Is there a way to make cmakelists.txt more verbose for compilation

Question

Many a times while compiling some binary or library, I feel a need to have much verbose output of the build/compilation. Is there a flag or something I can write in the cmakelists.txt so I get much more verbose output. FWIW, I'm using cmake 3.16.3 on Debian testing which will eventually become Debian bullseye. Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

When running cmake itself, there are a couple of options you can use to generate more detailed output:

cmake --debug-output

and

cmake --trace

(the latter with even more detail than the former).

When running the build, you can ask for a verbose build by running

make VERBOSE=1

or at the cmake stage, define CMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE:

cmake -DCMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE=ON

(which is what debhelper does by default when using cmake).