Extroot automated upgrade in user-guide unclear

Talk about Documentation
1

I have been reading about extroot and came to this very terse section:

It just lists a script or rather two commands that install two files, and I would very much appreciate some comments about how it is supposed to effectively work, e.g. how this handles upgrades of additional packages or other data installed on the USB drive. In my case, I would like to have both an extroot plus space for data (audio data for streaming via icecast) on the same USB device and would like to make upgrading of the necessary packages on extroot as automatic as possible.

2

You cannot reuse your existing extroot over an upgrade. The script just automates creating/populating a new extroot. FWIW, I just rm -rf /path/to/sda1/mount first.

As far as upgrading packages you added since your last upgrade, you will have to manage that yourself. I maintain a script to install any packages I’ve added to extroot.

Just partition your USB drive. i.e. from a 32GB USB (16GB for extroot and 4 X 4GB partitions):

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root                17152     17152         0 100% /rom
tmpfs                   255212     31084    224128  12% /tmp
/dev/sda1             14803288    125356  13906248   1% /overlay
overlayfs:/overlay    14803288    125356  13906248   1% /
ubi1:syscfg              30276       284     28412   1% /tmp/syscfg
tmpfs                      512         0       512   0% /dev
/dev/sda7              3645300       824   3439216   0% /mnt/shared
/dev/sda5              3645300      6204   3433836   0% /mnt/usb
/dev/sda8              3642228      7116   3430008   0% /mnt/testing
/dev/sda6              3645300     49604   3390436   1% /mnt/data
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