Installing a program in OS X using “make install” without being superuser?

Question

I'm trying to install the Insight debugger on OS X with "make install" but my permissions aren't high enough and I'm always denied. Is there any way to install without having/being a superuser? I have an admin account but I'm not sure how that can help me.

Edit:

Following the answer below ./configuration --prefix=/path/ works but the first make command dumps a huge amount of errors ending in

make[3]: *** [wish] Error 1
make[2]: *** [all] Error 2
make[1]: *** [all-tk] Error 2
make: *** [all] Error 2

Any idea what the non-tk errors are?

Answer 1

Yes, you just need to configure the build and release process it to use a prefix other than one that requires root access on your machine. When you run ./configure you can point the entire installation process to use a directory you have access to by supplying the --prefix option. Lets say you want to install in to ~/insight, you'd run:

./configure --prefix=~/insight
make
make test
make install

The install process will take care of creating ~/insight/[lib,bin,man,etc.] under your home directory for you.

You can get a list of configuration options that the ./configure script for your tool supports by doing:

./configure --help