Make target 'install' does nothing in cmake builds

[slackjaw]

Please fill in the following fields:

Pre-built SDK from the website or open-source from this repo: this repo
Firebase C++ SDK version: SDK 6.11.0
Firebase plugins in use (Auth, Database, etc.): N/A
Additional SDKs you are using (Facebook, AdMob, etc.): N/A
Platform you are using the C++ SDK on (Mac, Windows, or Linux): Linux
Platform you are targeting (iOS, Android, and/or desktop): desktop

Please describe the issue here:

following a cmake build, largely according to instructions:

mkdir desktop_build && cd desktop_build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/some/path
cmake --build . 

running make install does nothing, even as root. Expected behavior is to install libraries and headers at the path described by CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX

Please answer the following, if applicable:

Have you been able to reproduce this issue with just the Firebase C++ quickstarts ?

N/A

What's the issue repro rate? (eg 100%, 1/5 etc)
100%

[patm1987]

Right now the desktop SDK is in beta and not really intended for use in shipping games (see this).

As that changes, I think this would be a great change to the SDK!

[slackjaw]

Hi Patrick,
Thanks for the response - it is really good to see activity in this repo again. Much appreciated.

If the team doesn't want to add an install target, maybe they could make available the instructions/tools they use to build releases? There must already be something that knows what headers are needed and what tree structure they need to end up in. The problem with using the SDK as a subdirectory for cmake is that it adds a vast amount of overhead to the build process - increases the time for a single-threaded build by a factor of 200 for one project (binary release won't work due to CXX11 ABI incompatibilities)

[chkuang-g]

TL;DR; You can potentially leverage ccache to improve your build time. Just install ccache and add those lines in CMakeList.txt as this example.

We handle linking differently for prebuilt and open-source. For prebuilt, we have an internal build tool to include all symbols from dependent libraries to app.a. In open-source repo, we use CMake to discover all the dependencies and link them accordingly. If you want to link directly to the libraries built from open-source, you will need to link all dependent as well, which may not be obvious what to link.

We are currently changing our build process and potentially make some build tool available to public. But this can take awhile.

At the meantime, you should be able to leverage ccache so that you do not need to rebuild everything everytime. As you can see from this commit, this is how we build for our tests in the new build process.

Hope this helps!

[google-oss-bot]

Hey @slackjaw. We need more information to resolve this issue but there hasn't been an update in 5 weekdays. I'm marking the issue as stale and if there are no new updates in the next 5 days I will close it automatically.

If you have more information that will help us get to the bottom of this, just add a comment!

[google-oss-bot]

Since there haven't been any recent updates here, I am going to close this issue.

@slackjaw if you're still experiencing this problem and want to continue the discussion just leave a comment here and we are happy to re-open this.