py-instadmg and late stage caching

Hey all, Two things. First, I remember seeing somewhere either on the forum or over at googlecode that there were plans to port instadmg to python. Is this still something people are interested in doing? Has any work been done on it? Second, I've been looking into implementing some extra caching in instadmg, which will streamline the testing process by allowing you to create a new image in just the time it takes to install your package(s) and run instadmg's final checks. This is huge in reducing the amount of redundant work that instadmg performs every time you build an image. (Think 10.6.4 combo update.) The way I've been doing it here is pretty hacky, I just make a catalog file with all the packages that I don't need/want to have reinstalled everytime (for me, the most important one is the 10.6.4 update; it's a good 10 minutes everytime I run a build), and run the build normally. Now the hacky part: copy the image from it's output location into the Caches/BaseImageCache folder, with the same name as the previous base image cache (which you want to backup somehow, perhaps renaming it to .bak). Now when you run a build, don't include any of the packages that you installed in your cache. You should notice a marked improvement in build times. Clearly this process needs to be cleaned up and integrated into the actual code before it's really usable, but I just wanted to check if anyone was working on this. I'd love to hear what other people do to work around this redundancy. Best, James