2.2.1 Running ./configure

The ./configure script will analyze your environment and create custom Makefiles particular to your system. Aside from all the standard autoconf stuff, ./configure does the following:

  •   Finds out whether a program called apxs is available. This program is part of the standard Apache distribution, and is necessary for DSO compilation. If apxs cannot be found in your PATH or in /usr/local/apache/bin, DSO compilation will not be available.

    You can manually specify the location of apxs by using the --with-apxs option, e.g.:

        $ ./configure --with-apxs=/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs
    

    It is recommended that you specify this option.

  •   Checks your Python version and attempts to figure out where libpython is by looking at various parameters compiled into your Python binary. By default, it will use the python program found in your PATH.

     If the fist Python binary in the path is not suitable or not the one desired for mod_python, you can specify an alternative location with the --with-python options, e.g:

        $ ./configure --with-python=/usr/local/bin/python2.2
    

What is this????