Thanks Ben / Joseph,
I agree NDEBUG should not break the build but it does and the reason is quite complicated as we are replacing and rebuilding standard libraries taken from another package and this could be challenging of getting into the root cause of the build break.
Can you elaborate a little bit about string(REPLACE) - do you mean resetting CMAKE_<CXX/C>_FLAGS_RELEASE since I could not see that this affects the compile command and its -D options.
Thanks,
Serge