Many installation-related parameters can be set in the building stage of Postgres installation.
In most cases, these parameters should be placed in a file, Makefile.custom, intended just for that purpose. The default distribution does not contain this optional file, so you will create it using a text editor of your choice. When upgrading installations, you can simply copy your old Makefile.custom to the new installation before doing the build.
Alternatively, you can set variables on the make command line:
make [ variable=value [...] ]
A few of the many variables that can be specified are:
Top of the installation tree.
Location of applications and utilities.
Location of object libraries, including shared libraries.
Location of include files.
Location of installation-wide psqlODBC (ODBC) configuration file.
There are other optional parameters which are not as commonly used. Many of those listed below are appropriate when doing Postgres server code development.
Set flags for the C compiler. Should be assigned with "+=" to retain relevant default parameters.
Set flags for the yacc/bison parser. -v might be used to help diagnose problems building a new parser. Should be assigned with "+=" to retain relevant default parameters.
Enable Tcl interface building.
DocBook HTML style sheets for building the documentation from scratch. Not used unless you are developing new documentation from the DocBook-compatible SGML source documents in doc/src/sgml/.
DocBook style sheets for building printed documentation from scratch. Not used unless you are developing new documentation from the DocBook-compatible SGML source documents in doc/src/sgml/.
Here is an example Makefile.custom for a PentiumPro Linux system:
# Makefile.custom
# Thomas Lockhart 1999-06-01
POSTGRESDIR= /opt/postgres/current
CFLAGS+= -m486 -O2
# documentation
HSTYLE= /home/tgl/SGML/db118.d/docbook/html
PSTYLE= /home/tgl/SGML/db118.d/docbook/print