Missing Packages

For some reason, I cannot get packages to show up in the sysupgrade binary.

My openwrt .config file has:
CONFIG_PACKAGE_ubox=y
CONFIG_PACKAGE_libubox=y
CONFIG_PACKAGE_libubox-lua is not set

Nothing is populated in the build_dir and this coincides with nothing in the output image.
~/test/git/openwrt/build_dir/target-mips_24kc_musl/root-ath79/usr/lib
libubox.a and libubox.so do not appear in the above location.

The files do show up in the below location, but not the root-fs.
they show up here --> ~/test/git/openwrt/staging_dir/target-mips_24kc_musl/usr/lib
but not here --> ~/test/git/openwrt/staging_dir/target-mips_24kc_musl/root-ath79/usr/lib

Is there something I could be doing wrong? Any other useful data I can provide to debug this?