[oe] Package selection

[Dallas Clement]

Pardon my ignorance, I am a newb to OE / BitBake.  I've been building
custom embedded rootfs images the old fashioned way by hand for a long
time.

Recently I've been experimenting with OE / BitBake to determine if it
is suitable for my needs.  I want to be able to select exactly which
packages are included in my custom distro.  I tried to build the
"helloworld" example, and it seemed to download and build gobs of
packages, when all I wanted was the most rudimentary rootfs.  In fact,
for starters I'd like to build a rootfs that simply consists of a
statically built busybox and have the init process point to the ash
shell.  Is this even possible with OE?  Once I gain confidence with
something simple like this, I'd like to continue refining things by
adding packages that I select.

Lastly, it is possible to avoid the repeated fetching of source
packages?  In other words, can the source URI's point to packages in a
local file system repository?

Thanks much,

Dallas