third party HW support needs some debugging capabilities.

[WestfW]

The third-party support (boards.txt, platforms.txt, variants, etc) needs some debugging output. Currently you can add a ~/Arduino/hardware/xxx/etc boards.txt file, and have none of the boards appear in the menus, and not have a clue as to why (or whether it even found your file(s).)

Perhaps console output, shift-startup, or a debug preference somewhere that at least shows which files were read, which boards/etc were added, and so on.

[umbynos]

Hey @WestfW, I don't think we will add this to the CLI but we developed https://github.com/arduino/arduino-lint for this exact reason, try it out! Feel free to reopen it if needed.