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By default, ‘make install’ installs the package’s commands under
/usr/local/bin, include files under /usr/local/include, etc.
You can specify an
installation prefix other than /usr/local by giving
configure the option --prefix=prefix, where
prefix must be an absolute file name.
You can specify separate installation prefixes for architecture-specific
files and architecture-independent files. If you pass the option
--exec-prefix=prefix to configure, the
package uses prefix as the prefix for installing programs and
libraries. Documentation and other data files still use the
regular prefix.
In addition, if you use an unusual directory layout you can give options like --bindir=dir to specify different values for particular kinds of files. Run ‘configure --help’ for a list of the directories you can set and what kinds of files go in them. In general, the default for these options is expressed in terms of ‘${prefix}’, so that specifying just --prefix will affect all of the other directory specifications that were not explicitly provided.
The most portable way to affect installation locations is to pass the
correct locations to configure; however, many packages provide
one or both of the following shortcuts of passing variable assignments
to the ‘make install’ command line to change installation locations
without having to reconfigure or recompile.
The first method involves providing an override variable for each
affected directory. For example, ‘make install
prefix=/alternate/directory’ will choose an alternate location for all
directory configuration variables that were expressed in terms of
‘${prefix}’. Any directories that were specified during
configure, but not in terms of ‘${prefix}’, must each be
overridden at install time for the entire
installation to be relocated. The approach of makefile variable
overrides for each directory variable is required by the GNU
Coding Standards, and ideally causes no recompilation. However, some
platforms have known limitations with the semantics of shared libraries
that end up requiring recompilation when using this method, particularly
noticeable in packages that use GNU Libtool.
The second method involves providing the ‘DESTDIR’ variable. For
example, ‘make install DESTDIR=/alternate/directory’ will prepend
‘/alternate/directory’ before all installation names. The approach
of ‘DESTDIR’ overrides is not required by the GNU Coding
Standards, and does not work on platforms that have drive letters. On
the other hand, it does better at avoiding recompilation issues, and
works well even when some directory options were not specified in terms
of ‘${prefix}’ at configure time.
Next: Optional Features, Previous: Compiling For Multiple Architectures, Up: Running configure Scripts [Contents][Index]