Installing gdb alone and into a distinct directory.

Installing gdb alone and into a distinct directory.

[Daniel Manfis]

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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Re: Installing gdb alone and into a distinct directory.

[David Taylor]

    From: "Daniel Manfis" <dany_100@yahoo.com>
    Date: Tue, 22 May 2001 21:36:33 +0200

    So, to sum up a questions:

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

Assuming you want to not build libbfd, libiberty, libreadline, etc.,
but instead use installed versions, then the answer is: Not currently.

    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.

What I would suggest is *first* configure the entire tree to the
"throw away" location, *then* reconfigure those portions you want to
keep to a different location.  From your writeup, it sounded like you
were doing the reverse.

Note: if you want to install just gdb and not the other stuff, then
after a successfull make from the top level, you should be able to
just cd into the gdb subdirectory and type "make install" to have just
the gdb stuff installed without installing libbfd/libreadline/etc.