Raspberry Pi Forums

Normal steps for building package for a host system are
1)configure, make, make install
configure generate Makefile for the host system

However in Cross compiling, can you still do ./configure? and if you don't do configure there won't a Makefile . If you configure it's only for host system not the intended target.

Check ./configure --help. You set the host, target, path to libraries and includes and off you go. In reality, it's never that simple and each package will cross-compile differently. That's why people create cross-development environments which can't be contaminated by host platform libraries and such.
https://github.com/bmanojlovic/rpi-cross-compile

Aside from that, you really need to know how to use gcc and autotools very well. Maybe look at the cross linux from scratch book to get a better idea.