on embedded machines it takes a while to simply compress/uncompress tarballs ... if there was an option to simply work with .tar's, i'd be happy :p
Currently catalyst 2.0 is in a feature freeze, so we can actually get out a final version before 2006.1 is done. Feel free to write up a patch, and we'll look at inclusion for 2.0.1 (or later). Otherwise, we'll see about getting this in after the release. Until that time, all of the tar commands are actually shelled out in the code, so you can simply remove the "j" from them all in catalyst locally. In fact, if you had some kind of USE flag idea, we could implement that quite easily with a patch.
OK. I've added the "compress" option for catalyst.conf, but it is currently commented. The general idea here is that we will have catalyst compress the tarballs only if options=compress but most of the code needs to take this into account, first.
this seems to be fixed in the latest git. the source_subpath now allows you to specify the full input (so i can use "seed.tar"), and there's a compression_mode for disabling the output compression.
