I'm interested in trying xorg. Can somebody suggest what might be the
least painful way to do this, if the NetBSD host is a laptop, the
every-day desktop machine, and has an existing X11R6 from xsrc which is
populated with lots of applications that are depended on, including
stuff linked into gnome/gtk2

I suspect that the safest first-pass is to make xorg into an
alternate packaging hierarchy, but that may require bootstrapping a lot
of other packaging content in it first. -I can then re-start X off the
new path, prove it works, debug things, completely cleanly.

Another approach I'm considering is to use an overlay FS which does
white-outs to replace the underlying readonly reference of X11R6. This
would let me try running apps originally linked against X11R6 with
xorg, and have missing stuff 'satisfied' by the underneath FS.

What do people think?

-George