Hi again to my Gentoo Friends, There is, apparently, a new afterstep released a couple of days ago. The patch for 1.8.10-r1 seems applicable to 1.8.11 as well. This is probably not high-priority, but I thought I'd let you know. There's also a new esound released, but copying the old ebuild file to reflect the new version causes an alsa fail on my system. I am investigating that issue, anyway.
I would like to add libxpm support at some point, so I am leaving this bug open. However, 1.8.11 has been checked in.
libxpm support has been added and checked in. libxpm can be found in media-libs/xpm