Originally published at: Manifests: Project Sanity in the Ever-Changing Zephyr World - Golioth
If you take one thing away from this [talk], it should be this: Manifest files are a great way to manage revision control in your Zephyr applications. Mike Szczys is my teammate in the Developer Relations group and the primary firmware engineer creating Golioth Reference Designs. We build on top of the Golioth Zephyr SDK to create showcase examples of how you can use Golioth firmware and cloud capabilities to create real-world applications quickly. To keep everything straight, we rely heavily on Zephyr manifest files to ensure we are always building the correct code each time. We include things like the Zephyr codebase, the Golioth Zephyr SDK codebase, the Nordic Connect SDK codebase, and any custom code we write, all of which might be at different points in their lifecycles. It’s not a stretch to say that it’d be nearly impossible to manage all the code we use on a daily basis without manifest files. Mike used the knowledge he has built to give the above talk at the Zephyr Developer Summit 2023, which was part of the larger Embedded Open Source Summit in Prague in June of this year. What is a manifest? Zephyr utilizes a manifest file, which is part of the west meta-tool. These are a tough topic at first because they have multiple levels of inheritance possible. If you’re using a vendor-provided manifest file (or using one of the vendor SDK tools that hides the complexity), you likely will have an easy time following along their path. But once you want to start customizing your own project, you need to dig in and learn how they work. A visualization of the west meta tool, showing how confusing…