A full installation involves up to four steps; Install options let you choose them explicitly. See Install options for more specific details; the procedures use the following steps.
1.
Extract binary from the tape (option, extract
binary).
2.
Extract source from the tape (option, extract
source).
3.
Write copies of your system include
files, adjusted for portability (needed for the compilation tools; option,
fixincludes).
4.
Run a simple test of the installed programs (option, test).
The last two of these actions (fixincludes and test) are not needed for cross-development configurations. (A cross-development configuration runs on a host, and is meant to develop code for another platform, the target. Cross development tapes have target =target on the media label. Where target stands for the target to which you build; for names, see Host names and Target names)
These two actions can only run on your host. If you read the tape on another machine, you must specify the extract option explicitly in order to indicate that you dont expect the other two actions to run (since you are aware of the need to run further installation steps on your host).
Install also has two command line options that you can use to adapt the installation to your system: --tape and --installdir.