Well, as a matter of fact, OpenWrt is probably the smallest you will get with a 'package manager'. It's really quite well made for that purpose. They have 'pack

Well, as a matter of fact, OpenWrt is probably the smallest you will get with a 'package manager'. It's really quite well made for that purpose. They have 'package install', they have 'full upgrade' and they also have an overlay filesystem to make changes to what is technically a read only system.... Personally, I prefer a tiny, very compact ROM style filesystem; if I need a package, I just rebuild it with it, and reboot. I'm the author of minifs: https://github.com/buserror/minifs https://github.com/buserror/minifs that is made to do just that. However, we're reaching the point where the kernel is so full of crud that it is in itself the bloatware, and far worse than the userland :-(