Add "west gtags" extension

[mbolivar]

I might be a dinosaur, but I just love indexing and searching large C code bases with GNU Global.

I've been doing it for years and have provided references on how to integrate it with west to users who ask how I search for code for years now.

I think it might be useful to have this as an out of the box feature, so add a "west gtags" command that indexes the workspace for source files and creates a global tags file that you can use to find function definitions with it. Hopefully the associated documentation commit makes the use cases clear.

[mbolivar]

Note that this is similar in spirit to the Linux build system's "make gtags" command, except this searches the entire workspace. This is very useful to me as a maintainer because it can be used to index all the symbol definitions everywhere, not just for a single application build or something like that the way an LSP server might offer.

[pdgendt]

This looks cool, I need to take a closer look at a GNU globals compatible setup for my neovim configuration 😅. Using fzf all the time is time consuming.

[carlescufi]

This looks cool, I need to take a closer look at a GNU globals compatible setup for my neovim configuration 😅. Using fzf all the time is time consuming.

Same here! I use fzf for everything but I think I will give globals a chance now that @mbolivar has integrated the tag generation into west.

[pdgendt]

Ouch

~/zephyrproject $ du -hs G*
42M     GPATH
1.2G    GRTAGS
2.7G    GTAGS

[nashif]

Ouch

~/zephyrproject $ du -hs G*
42M     GPATH
1.2G    GRTAGS
2.7G    GTAGS

is this tagging the complete workspace?

[pdgendt]

is this tagging the complete workspace?

Yes, zephyr main with optional modules active.

[nashif]

Yes, zephyr main with optional modules active.

no wonder then, I use ctags per git repo usually, and that is manageable, but I guess it makes sense to work on the workspace, if the workspace is "managed" and not everything.

btw, wondering if the large data set impacts performance of vim for example, or any editor...

[mbolivar]

Yep, as documented in the global page, the tags files are quite large. But the search is nearly instant, and I don't notice any perf degredations either at the command line or within emacs (which is where I normally use global -- via helm-gtags.el)