When installing R (the interpreter and the shared library) the documentation says that one should follow the next steps:
# <go to the R source directory>
make distclean
./configure --enable-R-shlib
make
make install
Here I have one question:
Q1. What is the difference between make
and make install
(do I need to run both commands?)
Q2. Say I don't have root access that I would like to install R under a specific path /path/to/R/
. The documentation mentions I should use the options:
./configure --prefix /path/to/R
and
make prefix=/path/to/R install
Do I really have to pass the path to both commands? (i.e. to ./configure
and to make
). If I recall correctly from installing other SW, usually using the ./configure --prefix
is enough.
make
) to support aprefix
variable (although it often has a different name) that sets the location where the software will be copied in themake install
step, and for the./configure
step (which generates the Makefile) to support a--prefix
option to set the default value of that variable in the Makefile. So either of them should suffice. I only use the prefix option on./configure
.