The Issue

Some System Administrators like to change application prefixes around for security, organization and other reasons. Sometimes, being to quick for their fingers, they may forget a step in the install process. Once the source is ready for ‘make’, your configure options have already been parsed and saved. Running ‘./configure’ multiple times without a ‘make clean’ could cause some unwanted behavior.

Example

In this example, ‘./configure’ was run on Apache source without a ‘–prefix’. The second time we ran it, we included a prefix of ‘/usr/local/apache-2.2′. As you can see, the default prefix is ‘/usr/local/apache2′, which carried over to the second make instance of Apache.

/bin/sh /opt/httpd-2.2.22/srclib/apr/libtool --mode=install /usr/bin/install -c -m 755 libaprutil-1.la /usr/local/apache21/lib
libtool: install: error: cannot install `libaprutil-1.la' to a directory not ending in /usr/local/apache2/lib
make[2]: *** [install] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/opt/httpd-2.2.22/srclib/apr-util'

The Fix

“Don’t be mean, use ‘make clean’”

If you are running configure more than once, make sure you use ‘make clean’ between each ‘./configure’, ‘make’ and ‘make install’.

Enjoy!