Hi Thomas,
Yes, the process you describe would be more or less the way to get the package not included into any of the existing Yocto or OpenEmbedded layers (and there are a lot of them) built.
And no, I not saying that's the best or the only way to do things :-) I was just interested in getting this Yocto-provided capability working and published the results of my exploration.
I definitely agree the well-established distros have a very big advantage of having an elaborated package ecosystem when a lot of packages are available right away in publicly available repos. That's why I appreciate the work you and others do in those Debian-related threads and I have mentioned that there.
I believe there's a place for both approaches. For instance I personally don't need a full-blown distro on Galileo, because I don't need an arbitrary package on it at arbitrary moment. The typical distro will most probably be slower than trimmed-down Yocto-generated one and have tons of unnecessary bloat wasting the SD card space I don't need on a board which will do just several pretty much specified functions in my projects and I will prepare packages or plain compiled binaries for those using Yocto or cross-compilation toolchain or a temporary installed SDK image in advance. I prefer to have an optimized system able to run required functions at maximum possible performance level with only those functions available (for security and again performance), that's where Yocto with its capability of generating a tailored Linux distro comes in handy.
On the other hand, you and other people working in that thread, as well as many other people, I'm pretty sure, would want to have a generic Linux playground or avoid all those compilation steps and be able to install whatever at whatever moment, or have some other reasons I just can't think right now - and that's IMHO absolutely ok, that's the Maker and Open Source spirit. My personal guess is that with time, as community grows and Quark-based product become more commonplace, we'll see distros catching up on that and rolling out versions tailored for it, which wouldn't require any major work on our side. Especially given the fact that's x86 after all and Linux is used from the very beginning as the OS - so I guess they'll upstream all the specific tweaks to the vanilla kernel.