How do you upgrade a library on a buildroot system?

Question

I am very new to embedded Linux and am working with buildroot. We have a DNP3 library that is very old and would like to upgrade from 2.3 to 3.1. I do not know where to even start. Can someone point me to a tutorial or instructions on how to upgrade an existing library or package?

Answer 1

It's not explained explicitly in the Buildroot manual, but updating a package is:

• finding the package directory (e.g. package/dnp3);
• change the version number in the dnp3.mk file;
• download the package with make dnp3-source;
• this will give an error because of a missing hash: note the hash and update it in dnp3.hash.

Of course, often that is not enough because the updated package has new dependencies, or it has to be patched to be able to build it in cross-compilation, or various other issues.