about `make` and debug source code
 

I always write source code and use
gcc -g somefile.c
to creat program which can debug by gdb.

And now, I am reading a little bigger program's source code.
I made some change and want to debug it.
I only can
./configure&&make&&make install
to run it and see the result.
I want to kown, how to debug it with gdb on this condition?

I don't konw a lot about configure and make, if there is some books to explain thes ?

if you just run ./configure and then make you will get the
binaries where ever the programer configured make to put them.
of course you could ask the program maintainers how to debug it
the GNU c programming tutorial has notes on using make

Why do people programing in that way?
There is many IDE these day
KDevelop, Eclipse and so on.
Why don't you try them.
If you use one of them, you won't get such problem.

You might inherit it one day from someone.
And what if you don't have a graphical environment.

Try ./configure --help you can probably add make FLAGS.

IDEs are nowhere near as powerful as a fully learned up
vi/make user.
Knowledge is power.

Knowledge is power, but no one can know everything.
Some hints improve the work and harm nothing.

True true.
Good point.

But if you are in a professional environment (i.e. a job) it's best to keep it simple.
A combination of vi and make will be on virtually every system. As you become
skilled you build up tricks, scripts templates etc. and it becomes a lot more
efficient to work in this way.

If it wasn't true vi and make would have died years ago!

Is rpmbuild similar to make? I used rpmbuild -bb on a spec file and it created two files. packagename.rpm and packagename.debuginfo.rpm. What is the debuginfo file? What will happen if i install it? :newbie:

have you tried the man page?

Yes! It tells me all about the options and which options do what but nothing about creating a debug rpm