[OE-core] [PATCH] cmake: Displace VERBOSE setting

[Ross Burton]

On 19/12/2019 08:52, André Draszik wrote:
> Hi Khem,
> 
> On Wed, 2019-12-18 at 15:39 -0800, Khem Raj wrote:
>> Setting VERBOSE always, while is fine on one hand for debugging, its
>> coming at an expense of creating lots and lots of logs, e.g. qtwebkit
>> compile logs alone with VERBOSE is 163MB, there are many other large
>> packages which use cmake e.g. WPE, webkitgtk etc which are in same range
>> with out this option on, the logs reduce to 861K and also speeds up
>> build a notch
>>
>> If user needs to enable this logs for targetted debugging debugging that
>> could be added via
>>
>> EXTRA_OECMAKE_BUILD += "--verbose"
>>
>> in recipe
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Khem Raj <raj.khem at gmail.com>
>> Cc: Ross Burton <ross.burton at intel.com>
> 
> I don't agree with the reasoning to always disable this by default. - it's
> way too useful in general. I can't count the number of times it was enough
> to look at the log.do_compile to figure out something is wrong.
> 
> Now you have to recompile everything with this merged, and something that
> took 5 minutes to debug becomes an arduous task.
> 
> If the Webkit build is too verbose, you should make that specific recipe
> less verbose. E.g. you could always set
> EXTRA_OECMAKE_BUILD, and just clear
> it out in the webkit recipe.
> 
> Otherwise, based on the same reasoning, you should disable all logs, not just
> cmake logs: kernel, make output in general, bitbake logs. They all take up space.
> 
> Seriously, those logs are useful, keeping in mind that often logs are
> collected on build-machines, and having easy access is a huge time-saver.

Personally I agree with André.  We have verbose logs for autotools and 
meson, so why is cmake special.  As this is a webkit-specific issue for 
you, the neater fix would be to override this in webkit.

Stepping back though, why are 163MB log files a problem?  Are you 
archiving every log maybe?  If so then there's an argument to be made 
for a global "logs should be verbose" toggle, that defaults to on but 
you can set to off.  That way the kernel, autotools, etc can also follow 
the same logic and *all* logs can be smaller.

Ross