On Sat, 9 Sept 2023 at 15:07, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
On Thu, Sep 07, 2023 at 01:25:15PM -0400, Val Kulkov via talk wrote:
> To the best of my knowledge, OpenWRT retains all manually installed
> packages during system upgrade if you use their "sysupgrade" utility, with
> the exception of the x86_64 platform. On x86_64, upgrading is indeed a
> pain. But then there is the "Attended Sysupgrade", which I have not tried
> yet: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/attended.sysupgrade

I have to reinstall packages after every sysupgrade.  It will keep a
list of packages you installed, but it sure doesn't install them for you.

I think they have an option now to generate images with a list of extra
packages for you.  I haven't looked at that yet.

Use "make menuconfig" to customize your image and add packages, save the changes and then execute:
./scripts/diffconfig.sh > diffconfig

The "diffconfig" file will contain all your customizations and added packages. Next time you are about to build an image, execute:
cp diffconfig .config
make defconfig

If you want to put custom files in your image, like for example your current configuration in /etc/config/* create <buildroot>/files/ and copy your files there. They will be baked into the image.

For more details, see https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-developer/toolchain/use-buildsystem 

After that, you can build your image with