I'm trying to save some storage space on my device because I'm running into situations where I can't install packages because I ran out of storage space.
AFAIK the initial mounted overlay is the same after each reboot even if new software has been installed. So if you have a version of package installed that if different than what's on your ROM image then you are using twice the storage space as you would on a traditional filesystem because the original package doesn't get replaced in the image and the updated package is stored on a separate writable partition that is overlaid over the read-only overlay?
Is that what updating the feeds before building an image does? It updates all the packages to the latest versions so that they will be written into the image? If not, how could I go about creating an image of the latest stable release OpenWrt that has the latest versions of the packages built into the image?