Clarification - this section does actually call out distro-feed-configs from meta-oe, so it's not technically incorrect, but I'm not sure we should be doing that in the manual. People shouldn't need to be adding meta-oe just to get this basic functionality.

I wanted to experiment with this before submitting any update for the manual
and I can't seem to get it working.

I updated my conf/local.conf as follows:
1) added "package-management" to EXTRA_IMAGE_FEATURES
2) added the following lines:
IPK_FEED_URIS = "\
        all##http://192.168.7.1/BOARD-dir/all \
        armv5##http://192.168.7.1/BOARD-dir/armv5 \
        "

I did a build (core-image-minimal) and even checked the log file
(tmp/work/qemuarm-poky-linux-gnueabi/core-image-minimal/1.0-r0/temp/log.do_rootfs)
and found:
    Added all feed with URL http://192.168.7.1/BOARD-dir/all
    Added armv5 feed with URL http://192.168.7.1/BOARD-dir/armv5

But when I run the image and look in /etc/opkg I don't see any changes.

From what I can understand from the bbclass it looks like this code is
making updates to /etc/opkg/opkg.conf (?). I would have expected it to
make changes to base-feeds.conf.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong?

The more I play with this, the more I can't help think the following
is needed. With this change the target ends up with a non-zero-sized
/etc/opkg/base-feeds.conf which I can then simply do "$opkg update"
and refresh the package repository.

diff --git a/meta/classes/rootfs_ipk.bbclass b/meta/classes/rootfs_ipk.bbclass
index b0805dc..1537af4 100644
--- a/meta/classes/rootfs_ipk.bbclass
+++ b/meta/classes/rootfs_ipk.bbclass
@@ -159,7 +159,7 @@ ipk_insert_feed_uris () {
 echo "Added $feed_name feed with URL $feed_uri"
 
 # insert new feed-sources
-echo "src/gz $feed_name $feed_uri" >> ${IPKGCONF_TARGET}
+echo "src/gz $feed_name $feed_uri" >> ${IMAGE_ROOTFS}/${sysconfdir}/opkg/base-feeds.conf
 done
 
 # Allow to use package deploy directory contents as quick devel-testing

(In reply to comment #0)
> This should be replaced with IPK_FEED_URIS which is valid for
> OE-Core.

Defining IPK_FEED_URIS simply causes some modifications to be made to
${WORKDIR}/opkg.conf. Defining FEED_DEPLOYDIR_BASE_URI, however, causes
files to be created on the target for opkg to use.

Therefore I assume this is what you mean.

I have provided the a patch for consideration:
https://lists.yoctoproject.org/pipermail/yocto/2013-November/019177.html

Hi, 

I applied Trevor's patch to the development manual.  You can see the updated section at http://www.yoctoproject-org/docs/1.6/dev-manual/dev-manual.html#runtime-package-management-target-ipk.

I pushed the fix to both the 1.6 and the dora (1.5.1) branches.  However, the updated text is not available there yet though as I don't rebuild the 1.5.1 doc set until the end of the day.

Marking the docs as "Done". 

thanks, 
Scott