Currently, repoman only checks use.local.desc in the portage tree and not in overlays. I changed line 529 of repoman (portage-2.1.1_pre-r2) from: mylist=portage.grabfile(portdir+"/profiles/use.local.desc") To: mylist=portage.grabfile(portdir_overlay+"/profiles/use.local.desc") This fixed it, but I was sure it would break checking portage's use.local.desc, but when I tried it with a few small tests, it worked fine. However, I'm sure a better solution would be combining the use.local.desc of both the portage tree and the overlay, but I had no idea how to do this since I don't know Python. This issue also affects checking licenses and probably other things too.
This is fixed in svn r3750.
Support for licenses and arch.list are in svn r3751 and r3752, respectively. This has been released in 2.1.1_pre2-r2.