[OE-core] Using OpenEmbedded for customized builds

[Holger Hans Peter Freyther]

Good Morning,

we have a basic product and build the images for it using
OpenEmbedded. Some customers require the installation of
additional packages, or even the modification of some of
the installed ones. The current approach would be to build
one VM per customer but that doesn't really scale.

I think somehow I want to end up with having my base/generic
buuld and a way to put additional ipk's into a customer 
directory. So something likes this:

  base-build/tmp/deploy/ipk/
                            armv5te/
                            machine/
                            customer1/
                                      armv5te/
				      ...
                            customer2/
                                      armv5te/
                            customer3/

or

  base-build/tmp/...
 
  customer1-build/tmp/deploy/ipk/...

In both cases the customer should only include the packages
that were built for the customer. All the 'base' packages should
be taken/used from the base built. I could indicate for which
customer I build by setting an environment variable?

For a corner case, e.g. if I change the SRCREV and re-build with
a customer flag set, this package should still go to the customer
directory.

Can this be already modeled? Do you have any idea how this could
be done?


holger