[yocto] Yocto and Google protobuffer

[Pietro]

Hi all,

I am new to the Yocto building system and I could be talking nonsense. I
used to work with buildroot time ago and I remember there is an area
where compiled software/packages/tools previously built are "staged" and
used when building other packages.

Is there something like that available with Yocto ? Specifically I would
like to add a package which uses the Google Protocol Buffer, I do not have
administrator rights on the machine and I can't install the packages I
need system wise.

Is it possible to add recipes and use them at building time without
including them in the image being generated ?

A good example for that would be the protoc, the protocol buffer description
file compiler.

Thanks in advance,
Pietro.