I believe you will still need a tree either way.

I would just have the master server share it's portage tree over nfs, 
and then when you update the nodes of the cluster, just mount the nfs 
share, run your emerge system or world or whatever, and then when you 
are finished umount the nfs share.

I imagine this could be done easily via scripts, complete with error 
checking for bad mounts bad emerges etc.

Ronan Mullally wrote:
> Hi Karl,
>
> On Mon, 21 May 2007, Karl Holz wrote:
>
>   
>>> Is there a way to run gentoo without a portage tree on each box?
>>>       
>> yes, if  you setup a build system, using a stage3 tarball, and build your
>> system into a directory. Portage will only be under your /usr/portage and not
>> into the system image you're building. the good thing about using a Stage3
>> tarball is you can build you system on any linux system, build your system
>> image, tarball the image, deploy and install grub on x86, yaboot on Mac PPC,
>> silo on Sparc64.
>>     
>
> How are updates handled?  "emerge -uD <pkg|world>" isn't going to work
> without a portage tree, so I presume I'd need to tell each server which
> packages need to be updated with "emerge <pkg1> <pkg2> ... <pkgn>" to have
> it download them from the binhost?
>
>
> -Ronan
>