West manifest imports

This issue has evolved over time following a lot of discussion. Its eventual scope settled down to an enhancement to west which allows users to import content from other manifest files into their west.yml.

The final “resolved” manifest contains its own projects, plus projects obtained via imports. This resolved manifest is the logical data which commands like west list, west update, etc. operate on.

Imports can come from:

• within the manifest repository itself (if I want to split up my manifest into multiple files in one repository)
• a project in my manifest file’s projects: list (if e.g. I want my own manifest which treats the zephyr repository as a project, and import zephyr/west.yml into my own manifest to get its modules)
• a combination of these

Imports are recursive: I can import manifest A, which itself imports B, and get the projects from B.

The Zephyr documentation PR 20433 is the authoritative definition of the scope of this issue (i.e. of west #221).

Definition of done:

• add initial support in west https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/west/pull/330/
• documentation for initial support level https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/pull/20433
• cut a beta release (note: done as 0.6.99.dev4)
• collect user feedback
• implement ‘map’ imports (planned feature not provided initially)
• update documentation to reflect ‘map’ import final implementation
• do another beta (note: done as 0.6.99.dev5)
• west.manifest unit tests for all major use cases (see https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/west/pull/363)
• integration tests for built-in west commands for all major use cases (see https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/west/pull/363)
• collect final user feedback

Specific items to address in follow up work:

• west manifest --resolve implementation (https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/west/pull/348)
• whether we can load files from the file system when importing from projects, e.g. https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/west/pull/330#issuecomment-566982785 (answer: no)
• double-processing some projects in west update https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/west/pull/330#pullrequestreview-333329703 (addressed in https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/west/pull/364)
• whether we can bring back the existing remote behavior on clone now that we have ignore semantics https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/west/pull/330#discussion_r359373681 (addressed in https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/west/pull/364)
• allow west update on projects in the top level manifest even when it uses imports https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/west/pull/330#issuecomment-566982042 (addressed in https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/west/pull/364)
• detect and throw errors on manifest import loops (addressed in https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/west/pull/366)

[tejlmand]

whether we can load files from the file system when importing from projects, e.g. #330 (comment)

This is nice to have, far from need to have, so I suggest to keep out of 0.7scope and maybe create a followup task so it can be addressed individually later 😉

[mbolivar]

I’ve begun work on this. It’s going to be a release blocker for west 0.7.