Which will probably be never.
Imo just use something else. If your build system is really simple just write the Makefiles yourself. If the build system tho needs to be really complex I would use something like meson or scons (Having worked on some gigantic fully GNU make build systems it can get pretty out of hand).
This is all a personal preference thing but cmake in my experience is really non intuitive and a pain to debug. I know it works for a lot of people but I definitely prefer particularly like scons since its python I have a bit easier time understanding what’s happening.
If you really need to use cmake, use a debugger like another user commented. There’s also a GNU make debugger in case you need to debug makefiles
Did you know that there is a debugger in Jetbrains CLion (and I think VS as well) that allows you to step through your CMake scripts? As ridiculous as this may seem, actually it is really useful.
Life is and will always be better writing your own Makefiles. It’s literally so easy. I do not get the distaste. Cmake is arcane magic. Bazel is practically written in runes. Makefile is a just a glorified build script, but where you don’t have to use a bunch of if statements to avoid building everything each time.
really anyone worth their salt should write perl code to generate makefiles depending on the phase of the moon and if you sacrificed a $chicken, a @chicken, or a %chicken at runtime.
I mean, all cmake does is run some commands for you. You not understanding cmake errors (mostly) means you don’t understand the errors given to you by the C/C++ compiler.
Partly, yes. But I also think their documentation is a bit hard do read. Maybe this will get better with time.