I frequently need to debug a failed build in spack. At least for cmake-based packages, this would be much easier if the project was configured with -DCMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE=ON or equivalently, make was run with the option VERBOSE=ON. Could one of these be the default? This would save the detailed build instructions into spack-build.out, which is useful IMHO. If that is not reasonable, maybe we could have a -V (very verbose) option for spack install.

What do you think?

Are there similar tricks that can be played with other build tools to increase their output verbosity?