I am new to buildroot. Using buildroot 2016.05, I have successfully built a target SD card for a MicroZed board with a Xilinx kernel, but it was missing some utilities that I wanted in the root file system. In particular, I wanted scp.
Looking through the buildroot documentation and web searches didn't yield the answer, but I was able to search the Config.in files in the package folders for "scp" and eventually determine that I could install either dropbear or openssh to get scp.
Other than the brute force way I searched Config.in files, is there an approach with buildroot to resolve a "which package produces binary XYZ" question?
A big part of building embedded Linux systems is understanding the components of Linux systems in general. How do you figure out what packages to install on your desktop/server Linux installation? In this way Buildroot isn't really any different. As a help we do sort packages in groups (E.G. Network applications in this case) and provide help text for each package, but you are really expected to know that 'scp' is part of the ssh package (openssh or dropbear).
What can sometimes be helpful is to check what package a program comes from on your desktop Linux installation - E.G. dpkg -S $(which scp) for this question in case you are using Debian/Ubuntu