Yes, I think a --quiet would be good. In the case of some kind of
error/warning then it would be good for it to tell us that it's an error
compiling a file or whatever it might be. In other words, don't tell me
what you're doing unless something goes wrong. In most cases I would
expect/hope to get enough info from the error message to fix the problem
without having to turn off --quiet and re-do the build.
So potentially this may require a little re-working of some error
messages. If the error message is overly dependent on the user having all
the status info then we may want to repeat that info in the error message.