Gdb/Running-Configure
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C.2 Invoking the GDB configure Script
GDB comes with a configure script that automates the process
of preparing GDB for installation; you can then use make to
build the gdb program.
The GDB distribution includes all the source code you need for
GDB in a single directory, whose name is usually composed by
appending the version number to ‘gdb’.
For example, the GDB version 11.0.50.20201208-git distribution is in the
gdb-11.0.50.20201208-git directory. That directory contains:
gdb-11.0.50.20201208-git/configure (and supporting files)- script for configuring GDB and all its supporting libraries
gdb-11.0.50.20201208-git/gdb- the source specific to GDB itself
gdb-11.0.50.20201208-git/bfd- source for the Binary File Descriptor library
gdb-11.0.50.20201208-git/include- GNU include files
gdb-11.0.50.20201208-git/libiberty- source for the ‘
-liberty’ free software library gdb-11.0.50.20201208-git/opcodes- source for the library of opcode tables and disassemblers
gdb-11.0.50.20201208-git/readline- source for the GNU command-line interface
There may be other subdirectories as well.
The simplest way to configure and build GDB is to run configure
from the gdb-version-number source directory, which in
this example is the gdb-11.0.50.20201208-git directory.
First switch to the gdb-version-number source directory
if you are not already in it; then run configure. Pass the
identifier for the platform on which GDB will run as an
argument.
For example:
cd gdb-11.0.50.20201208-git ./configure make
Running ‘configure’ and then running make builds the
included supporting libraries, then gdb itself. The configured
source files, and the binaries, are left in the corresponding source
directories.
configure is a Bourne-shell (/bin/sh) script; if your
system does not recognize this automatically when you run a different
shell, you may need to run sh on it explicitly:
sh configure
You should run the configure script from the top directory in the
source tree, the gdb-version-number directory. If you run
configure from one of the subdirectories, you will configure only
that subdirectory. That is usually not what you want. In particular,
if you run the first configure from the gdb subdirectory
of the gdb-version-number directory, you will omit the
configuration of bfd, readline, and other sibling
directories of the gdb subdirectory. This leads to build errors
about missing include files such as bfd/bfd.h.
You can install GDB anywhere. The best way to do this
is to pass the --prefix option to configure, and then
install it with make install.
Next: Separate Objdir, Previous: Requirements, Up: Installing GDB [Contents][Index]
