Chris,

   The work you mention for catalyst has been something I've been very interested in leveraging for a while now (read years). If you want any contribution help, I'ld be interested in helping out.

   On a side note, I've been using a locally mounted squashfs overlayed with a bare writable fs (JFS in this case, but it could be any) via aufs to track my portage trees for a while. It lets me compress portage from 600+ mb down to about 50 mb AND speeds up portage access by an order of magnitude. This might be an interesting method to distribute/deploy the tree or even simply track it within catalyst as catalyst builds the updates. Let me know if this might be of interest to you.

John