The basic building block of the Yocto Project is the generation of packages; therefore, it is possible to include a package manager to our Yocto distribution (similar to a Linux distribution, for example). Indeed, after the generation of the image (refer Chapter 2), it contains no package manager, so this means that our image is not updateable (similar to a firmware, for example).
The inclusion of a package manager in our distribution is done through this variable, if adding it to conf/local.conf:
EXTRA_IMAGE_FEATURES += "package-management"
If adding to a recipe file (such as rpi-basic-image.bb), use this instead:
IMAGE_FEATURES += "package-management"
With this addition, we have now an image with a package manager that is more flexible, updateable, and more industrial. Here's how to install a package with the opkg package manager:
$ opkg install package_name.ipk