Luckily, Linux has moved to automatic packages and everything, and is usable for novices nowadays. But since I'm interested in internals a little bit, I would like to understand how does the software install from sources work.
Sometimes you get the sources, makefile and config files to build the source. But I have never fully understood such distribution internals, even though I'm a programmer myself, I've been programming mostly with MS stack.
Is the approach standartized? Makefiles are not just the compile script, they can copy files to system locations, create symlinks, envvars and so on.
So basically, sometimes you get a source to ~\Download, run make config, make, and some magic happens. Unless there are a lot of intermediate steps required.
But I don't fully understand the magic here. Does the source get's copied to /bin? /sbin? /opt?, is it symlinked, how is the binary linked for other users, is it safe to delete the source afterwards? Or do you have to review every single makefile in makefile chain to figure out what's happening?
Does anyone know a short, but good description on how this all works, or should work?