How to ensure up-to-date ImageBuilder packages

For Developers
1

I like to use ImageBuilder a lot - with a few scripts around it, it can be a very convenient and quick way to build customized images for my devices.

My question is about how to ensure the built image has up-to-date packages in it. Looking at the recent 23.05.2 release, I understand there is an important fix in netifd package version 2023-11-10-35facc83-1.1 . That package version is included in all prebuilt images for the 23.05.2 release, but the package itself (i.e. the .ipk file) is not available yet on openwrt mirrors for most architectures (i.e. I can see it for mips_24kc, but not for any of the 5 arm archs I like to build images for).

So there are a couple things I would like to understand:

  • The netifd package must have been built when preparing the 23.05.2 release images, so why doesn't that process also upload the built .ipk file at the same time as the built images ?
  • If I like to use the image builder, how can I ensure that all the included packages are up to date WRT a given openwrt release ? I mean, if I know about the netifd package in particular I could wait until the desired version is available on the mirrors, but is there a clean way to do it if I don't know what specific packages I need to watch for ?
  • if image builder is the wrong tool to ensure my packages are in sync with a given openwrt release, what would be the right tool I should try using instead ? (would that be the sdk ?)
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2

You are referring to the firmware selector and adding the customized packages?
That is an interesting question.

I just used that yesterday to see if one could, really, use a pi zero w (astonishingly, it works) and I used the firmware selector and then, in Luci looked for update lists.
It found an update and I uploaded it and installed.

Then I rebooted ran it again and, apparently, it was updated a no more updates were available.

But it does make one wonder how to update firmware that has packages 'baked in'.