Thanks to both you and J Decker: I would say that this is still the part that I understood! So basically the word "install" in cmake language could be replaced by "copy" more or less in common human language - right?
But then, if it is about "installing" a "target", which is libraries in my case, I would expect the shared libraries to be copied - no? And this is exactly what does not happen - for no obvious reason! Because some days ago it even happened in my project ONCE - and then not any more. But debugging is not easy because since that moment I changed many things, and basically the reason for my question is that I have no clear idea what EXACTLY should happen if I put a install(TARGETS mylibrary) into my CMakeLists.txt. Well, like you explained, and like what I also thought I had understood: nothing should happen during the configure and generate runs of cmake, and also not during the "ninja all" build run, but only during the "ninja install". or else cmake --build . --target install (which in turn calls ninja in my case). Indeed I observed that it does a build for "all" first if the initial project is not up to date. But then it tells me that it is successfully "installing" mylibrary, but I see no shared library appearing in the install tree! Or rather: it happened once, but not any more - and I should find out what is missing... My current workaround is indeed that I am trying to avoid the install step altogether and build a crazy construction with configure_file stuff in order to get the libraries to the right place - and I know pretty well that this is NOT the way how things should be done properly. But I am afraid I will be ready with this workaround way faster than I will understand what is going on during this miraculous "install" process!
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