Installing gdb alone and into a distinct directory.

["Daniel Manfis" <dany_100@yahoo.com>]

Hello.

There is a following problem:

I decided to install newest gdb version from sources, so i downloaded 
the latest snapshot, and wanted to compile it. But the problem is, 
that source package includes a lot of other programs except gdb, all
of them already present on my PC - compiled and installed only 
recently (2 weeks ago) from their snapshots (most of them came with 
gcc's snapshot), and i don't have neither need nor space to recompile 
everything afresh only because of gdb, and except - it takes much
more time.

Moreover, i have some special 'policies' for installing packages from
sources: as there is no way on Linux to uninstall source-compiled
packages cleanly, i always take advantage of '--prefix' switch, and 
every package hierarchy is getting installed into a distinct 
directory (for example, the '--prefix' for gdb is 
/usr/local/lib/gdb-5.0, for gcc: /usr/local/lib/gcc-20010424, for 
rxtv: /usr/local/lib/rxtv-2.6.3 etc.), so that if i want to remove a
package i don't have to hunt after it's files in /usr/local/bin, 
/usr/local/lib etc. (and of course forgetting to delete a lot of 
files belonging to that package while deleting other, critical files 
which belong to other packages i didn't want to remove) - i just 
delete relevant directory, and i am done.

But when i compile and install gdb, all the packages are getting 
thrown into the same directory, and i have a lot of trouble to divide 
between those packages.

I couldn't find any a way to configure and build gdb alone, into a 
separate directory - i tried to run configure from 'gdb' directory 
(./configure) specifying a prefix for gdb, and then a global 
configure with other prefix directory (intending just to delete it 
after all is done), but that didn't help - once again everything got 
installed into the same directory.

Well, after all i *did* succeed to install everything, but it took 
much more time and much, much more trouble, and i would have liked to 
know how to prevent all this for the future.

So, to sum up a questions:

1)How it is possible to build gdb alone without building all the 
other programs coming with it?

2)If it is impossible to build gdb alone, what could i do so that gdb 
will get installed into a separate directory, specified as a prefix, 
while all the others will get installed into other directory (or 
every one into it's own custom directory)?


Daniel.


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