Sorry for the double-post, but I realized that the latter half of my
inline responses might be easy to ignore, so I'm going to hang a lantern
on them with this email:

"Bolivar, Marti via Lists.Zephyrproject.Org"
<marti.bolivar=nordicsemi.no@...> writes:

From: devel@... <devel@...> on behalf of Marc Reilly via Lists.Zephyrproject.Org <marc.reilly=gmail.com@...>
However, it would be nice to be able to glue this all together with
some script etc to simplify the extra elements of the west commands
('theboard' 'BOARD_ROOT') etc.

No matter what you choose to use (mainline or NCS), though, you can
always tell 'west build' your default board like this:

west config build.board theboard

https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/guides/west/build-flash-debug.html#configuration-options

The build.board value will be used if you don't provide --board
(provided BOARD is also unset in the calling environment).

I thought about your BOARD_ROOT question. I've gotten other similar
requests recently, and I agree it would be useful, so I've proposed a
new "build.cmake-args" config option:

https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/pull/21251

With the patch from #21251, you can save your BOARD_ROOT like this:

west config build.cmake-args -- -DBOARD_ROOT=/abs/path/to/app

Your one-time setup work would then be:

west init -m git@.../SomeManifestRepo.git
west update
west config build.board theboard
west config build.cmake-args -- -DBOARD_ROOT=/abs/path/to/app

Note that plain 'west config var val' sets configuration options locally
(just for your west installation). See the --global and --system options
in the 'west config' documentation for alternatives.

# build and flash
west build -d build-mcuboot -s mcuboot/boot/zephyr
west build -d build-app -s app
west sign ...

Please make sure you see this part ^^.

Martí