What is your use case here? openwrt already supports device specific packages. Would a general profile system make more send, like "NAS" installing USB drivers etc, or "VPN" to install wireguard etc?

In freifunk we maintain lists of packages per device, like excluding -ct-drivers and including alternatives, excluding packages for some deivces to save memory (e.g. when partitioning is weird), adding some of our own packages.

In that feature, if you don't provide a file, everything works as before

ok thanks for the clarification

Wouldn't it be nicer to put the content of device_packages.json of into asu_extra_packages of config.js.

  // Attended Sysupgrade Server support (optional)
  asu_url: "https://sysupgrade.openwrt.org",
  asu_extra_packages: {
     "glinet,gl-mt3000": ["luci-app-wireguard", "wireguard-tools"],
     "tplink,archer-c7-v5": ["luci-app-sqm", "sqm-scripts"]
}

But we would still need to support the array syntax as it is now. For backwards compatibility.

The advantage would be that we have less configuration file clutter and simpler code. But maybe it is not worth it.
@aparcar do you have an opinion here?

But we would still need to support the array syntax as it is now. For backwards compatibility.

The advantage would be that we have less configuration file clutter and simpler code. But maybe it is not worth it.

That's why I thought it may be better to have another place for device specific packages.

I also thought about inlining the config (and fun fact: in between I worked with such a solution), but then I realized that could overload the config.js itself when working with dozens of devices and packages.