Define components in external flat file

[thompson-tomo]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
In open telemetry some of the contrib projects have a very large number of components and as such scripts/tolling is used to maintain this list. It would be useful if we could point changie to a flat file containing a list of all the components.

Describe the solution you'd like
If a file path is specified as a component each line of that file is treated as a new component exactly the same as if the contents were directly added to the array of components in the config.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Make scripts/tooling which manipulates the config file.

Additional context
N/a

[miniscruff]

This does bring up an idea I have considered which is to allow, for some or all of your config, to be external references. Something like file:///path or of course https://uri. I worry it would add a bit of time to running commands though unless they were all properly lazy loaded.

[thompson-tomo]

Interesting idea, I am not that sold on remote config as it goes against reproducible builds and if someone really wanted remote files they could achieve it by downloading the file prior to running changie as part of their build process.

Thinking about the use case for external config the only other scenario I can think of would be project definitions.

[miniscruff]

Interesting idea, I am not that sold on remote config as it goes against reproducible builds and if someone really wanted remote files they could achieve it by downloading the file prior to running changie as part of their build process.

Thinking about the use case for external config the only other scenario I can think of would be project definitions.

The ideas I had were to allow sharing one config across an org or team, sharing parts of the config across an org or team. Could be useful for versioning but less likely. Onboarding could be a thing, but yea not as much.

[miniscruff]

#610 this would be solved by my latest comment here with ref fields, I would like to add that as part of the v2 config format which I will actually get started on.

[miniscruff]

#847 started work here finally, hoping to include "ref" options for a significant portion of the new config spec, just gotta work it out. Might come in a later update but should be taken into account now.