Pushing patches upstream and using the stock Mesa seems to be going really well at this point.

I have a pretty solid 12MB patch that rips out the lib/mesa and does the complete OptionalPacakge build.

The gcc4 Mesa OptionalPackage is ~2MB in size (which isn't bad) and automatically generated from upstream mesa directly with a shell script.

Here are a few screenshots if you like those kinds of things:

http://twitpic.com/82se2i -- really slow broken teapot with lots of GL errors.
http://twitpic.com/82v3xf -- OpenGL preferences listing the new Mesa version.
http://twitpic.com/82v31z -- A now really broken GLTeapot after some "fixes" I was playing with.

Issues:
  Our stuff:
  * I had to make some large changes to the opengl mesa soft add-on
    - Mesa has changed a lot, as we are using non-public functions.. we had to make some adjustments to work with newer Mesa code.

  Mesa stuff:
    * There are still a few minimal 1-2 line patches which need to be applied to the upstream Mesa.
    * move away from static makefiles, as several Mesa developers said they are going away in favor of another automated build tool... can't remember what but it is in our port tree supposedly.
    * Gcc2!  *have* to figure out a patch set to enable compiling more recent Mesa sources under gcc2.

 All for now,

   -- Alex v.