I've spent a considerable amount of time with buildroot, a "scaffolding" tool for Linux operating system images. Buildroot has some assumptions that make the co

I've spent a considerable amount of time with buildroot, a "scaffolding" tool for Linux operating system images. Buildroot has some assumptions that make the composition of arbitrary files in a filesystem easy. First, system images are assumed to be static once composed. Specifically, you aren't meant to have a package manager, or run updates on any software. Persistent changes are fine for non RAMFS systems (persisting changes for a RAMFS is a fun puzzle to solve). Second, when you update a system image, it is a complete image by itself. Updates are not incremental. From the scaffolding perspective, this means that every time you want to change something in the scaffolding, you rebuild the entire thing. The Linux kernel follows a similar tack; if you make changes you rebuild the entire thing.