Hm, it would be cool if you could split this into several requests next time...

hey, hey, stop, stop. There might be a better solution:
CMake itself has a target nmake install/fast which doesn't retest whether files have been modified and simply runs the install step.
I am against the change in this way, for the following reasons:

1. Your option doesn't "compile fast" but simply skips the make step (and redoes it in the install step)
2. If you would have that option enabled, running emerge --compile will result in emerge --configure only (which I would call broken)
3. If you run emerge --qmerge you would get make, install, and qmerge at the same time.

Looks good, have you checked all comparisons against verbose() function?

General: Please try to find a single style for spaces and parentheses: either no spaces, or spaces after/before parentheses. Please don't mix, especially not in a single line...

2. Is it possible to have unittests when e.g. EmergeDebug.py and EmergeHash.py are run directly? Since you add EmergeHash here, could you write some lines that test e.g. that algorithms are found correctly, that empty files (or some specially generated temporary files) do have a reproduceable hash?