@LWN Funnily enough, I was doing this, … providing the binpackages that the Catalyst build tool produced whilst building the stage 3 images… back in Gentoo/MIPS days.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070808164606/http://dev.gentoo.org/~redhatter/mips/cobalt/
It's good to see it being an option provided as a standard feature though.