To build gdb
in a separate directory, run configure with the ‘--srcdir’
option to specify where to find the source. (You also need to specify a
path to find configure itself from your working directory. If the path
to configure
would be the same as the argument to ‘--srcdir’,
you can leave out the ‘--srcdir’
option; it is assumed.) For example, you can build GDB in a separate directory
for a Sun 4 using the following input:
cd gdb location
mkdir ../gdb-sun4
cd ../gdb-sun4
../gdb version-number/configure sun4
makeWhen configure builds a configuration using a remote source directory, it creates a tree for the binaries with the same structure (and using the same names) as the tree under the source directory. In the example, you’d find the Sun 4 library ‘libiberty.a’ in the directory ‘gdb-sun4/libiberty’, and GDB itself in ‘gdb-sun4/gdb’.
One popular reason to build several GDB configurations in separate directories is to configure GDB for cross-compiling (where GDB runs on one machine—the host—while debugging programs that run on another machine—the target).
You specify a cross-debugging target by giving the ‘--target=target’ option to configure.
When you run make to build a program or library, you must run it in a configured directory—whatever directory you were in when you called configure (or one of its subdirectories).
The Makefile that configure generates in each source directory also runs recursively.
If you type make in a source directory such as ‘gdb-4.17-98r2’ (or in a separate directory configured with ‘--srcdir=dirname/gdb-4.17-98r2’), you will build all the required libraries, and then build GDB.
When you have multiple hosts
or targets configured in separate directories, you can run make
on them in parallel (for example, if they are NFS-mounted on each of the
hosts); they will not interfere with each other.