xfree86 3.x vs xfree86 4.x (and problem building gnome2 -aka fontconfig

[atk2 at arctic.org]

Hello,

Yesterday (see previous note) I decided to upgrade from 4.5 to 4.10. I guess
what I really wanted was to upgrade the system utilities and ports. The 
problem I'm running into is all the newer multi-media stuff (gnome2, 
mozilla 1.6, ....) depend on fontconfig which depend upon XFree86 4.x (4.5
was based on Free86 3.x). Now the question is can i build these things without
upgrading X. I suppose I can upgrade X (not sure what new and wonderful problems
that will introduce and if my old configs for gnome1 and X are going to work
after the upgrade)?

My guess is I will have to bite the bullet and do the portupgrade -ra and/or
manually upgrade X to vs 3 to get out of my current state of things being 
1/2 built. But thought I would drop this note to see if anyone had any more
graceful suggestions.

Last but least I had one kernel panic last night - is 4.10 stable less stable
than 4.5 release ?? (no panics in 1+ years under 4.5). I was adding stuff to
a directory while deleting stuff from the directory (two scripts) when the
kernel panic (was really a panic - the kernel jsut rebooted while the scripts
were running - nothing in syslog). 

I did the buildworld upgrade but I still need to upgrade devices (i suppose this
is pretty naughty but I guess 4.5 and 4.10 are pretty close as things seem to
be running ok).

thanks,
Alan