Ninja: How to make build verbose by default

No. What's wrong with calling ninja with -v?

This cannot be fixed by ninja alone.

• First of all, cmake`s generator for ninja files has to be changed to support this. (In case of the makefile generator, cmake generates a makefile that suppresses the .SILENT special target target.)
  If I try what @gjasny suggests, I get

cmake -DCMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE:BOOL=ON -G Ninja ../src/cmake4eclipse/testprojects/C-1src/src1
-- Configuring done
-- Generating done
CMake Warning:
  Manually-specified variables were not used by the project:

• Ninja has to provide something like the special target .SILENT and variable expansion. But I doubt ninja is designed to expand variables.

CMake 3.3 has a work-around for this: https://github.com/Kitware/CMake/commit/ce935ebe50926bde199d86fbde4a78974a4043f9

If you configure with -DCMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE=ON then cmake --buildwill add the -v parameter to the ninja call.

Still it would be nice to get something we could add to the Ninjafiles. But currently I can live with the status-quo.

@gjasny , I use CMake 3.10 and though I set in CMakeLists.txt the following set(CMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE ON) I don't get any extra information form Ninja.

Any idea?

You need to make it a cache variable. Please see the CMake set command for how to do this.

For reference for others, this SET command did the work and made Ninja verbose:

set(CMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE ON CACHE BOOL "ON")

Still it would be nice to get something we could add to the Ninjafiles.

Why would you need that?

Please reopen, if you still think this is needed.

For other people who may have come to this bug: set(CMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE ON CACHE BOOL "ON") does not seem to work on Windows. Reproduction:

CMakeLists.txt

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.5 FATAL_ERROR)
project(simplecmake CXX)

set(CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD 11)
set(CMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS ON)

set(CMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE ON CACHE BOOL "ON")

add_library(simplecmake simple.cpp)

Contents of simple.cpp don't matter.

And then the script I use to run cmake.

@echo off
call "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvarsall.bat" x86_amd64
cd c:/Users/Administrator/ezyang/lab3
cd build
set CC=cl
set CXX=cl
cmake -GNinja ..
cmake --build .

Passing -DCMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE=ON to the cmake invocation does work though.

adding set(CMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE ON CACHE BOOL "ON" FORCE) to force cmake to swallow the setting worked for me. Perhaps you have to regenerate, though.