> Several companies maintain embedded Linux > distributions and tools to build software images. These tools provide a user > interface that allows to select what packages go into such an image.
The tools allow you to select what binary packages are placed into the image. You can build multiple binary packages from one source package. Desktop distributions are not likely to do this for something as small as iproute2. But embedded distributions can easily break up iproute2 into a number of smaller packages, as you suggested, tipc, devlink, tc, bridge, ss, etc. Openwrt does exactly this: https://github.com/openwrt-mirror/openwrt/blob/master/package/network/utils/iproute2/Makefile Andrew
