I haven't tested Chris's changeset, but the approach sounds great.  I
have noticed that, indeed, the intermediate packages don't get marked as
dirty.  If the changeset changes them to get marked dirty, then it
sounds great to me.  Right now I have been doing a lot of extra saves
because I am never sure whether even a "clean" package might have stale
dependencies.

I don't have a deep understanding of Monticello, though, so I can't say
for sure whether this is a Right Thing.  The issue is purely practical
matter for me: MC's dependencies let me *load* a tree of packages, but
currently they do not do what I want for *saving* a tree of packages.

-Lex