-----Original Message-----
From: Cufi, Carles
Sent: 28 January 2019 09:43
To: zephyr-devel <zephyr-devel@lists.zephyrproject.org>; zephyr-
users@lists.zephyrproject.org
Subject: Introducing west, Zephyr's meta-tool

Hi all,

For a few months now we have been working on a meta-tool named west,
designed to act both as a command-line tool to build, flash an debug
Zephyr-based applications and also to manage the additional Git
repositories that Zephyr will require in order to build in the near
future.

West is written in Python 3, lives in its own repository [1] and its
bootstrapper is available on PyPi [2].
As soon as we merge the topic-west [3] branch into master (which should
happen in the next few days) you will need to install west in order to
flash and debug, since those commands will rely on havig west present as
part of your Zephyr workflow.

The updated west documentation will be online in the Zephyr
documentation website [4] as soon as the topic-west branch is merged
into master. In the meantime you can also look at the unrendered
documentation sources in the topic-west branch [5] and the existing
GitHub issues [6][7].

In order to install the west boostrapper (which you can do today) run:

# On Linux
pip3 install --user west

# On macOS and Windows
pip3 install west

Once the west bootstrapper is installed and the topic-west branch is
merged into master, you will have 2 choices to get a west main
installation.

1. Clone a new copy of the zephyr repository using west:

west init zephyrproject
cd zephyrproject
west update

2. Install west around an existing local zephyr clone:

Move the cloned zephyr/ repository to an empty enclosing folder (for
example zephyrproject/zephyr/), and from this enclosing folder
zephyrproject/ run:

west init -l zephyr/
west update
The -l <path to zephyr> parameter instructs west to use an existing
local copy instead of cloning a remote repository.

Feedback and patches are welcome, but note that the feature will likely
be merged as-is since we consider we have left ample time to raise any
major issues regarding the workflow and decisions taken during the
development of west. This is however only the beginning of west's
(hopefully) long existence as the Zephyr command-line meta-tool, and it
will certainly evolve and change considerably in the future with the
help of the community.

Please submit feedback in the form of GitHub issues on the west
repository itself [1] unless it affects features or functionality in the
zephyr repository directly.

I will reply to this email once the topic-west branch is merged into
master.

Thank you to everybody who has contributed so far!

Regards,

Carles

[1] https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/west
[2] https://pypi.org/project/west/
[3] https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/tree/topic-west
[4] https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/tools/west/index.html
[5] https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/tree/topic-
west/doc/tools/west
[6] https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/issues/6205
[7] https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/issues/6770