Staying in sync sounds good to me. But I think that since portaudio/portmidi are not stable APIs and still alpha/beta code, we should maintain a copy in CVS.
portaudio/midi is fairly stable and not under particularly active development now that it supports everything people actually use like coreaudio alsa and mme/ds/asio - i wouldnt classify it under alpha/beta status even v19.. anyways it's a seperate project and should not be in the pure-data CVS, it has its own..
for PD, i suggest we move to darcs. it seems particularly well suited to the current situation where each developer more or less has their own version, may ease intra-branch feature stealing/merging and its underlying theory may even satisfy the sourceforge-patch-tracker fetishists:
(from http://osdir.com/Article2571.phtml )David Roundy: At its most basic level, the theory of patches is about the commutation, or reordering, of changes in such a way that their meaning doesn't change. Once the commutation primitives have been worked out, one can do all sorts of interesting (and useful) operations, such as merging. And such operations can be shown to be independent of order, i.e. it doesn't matter whether you merge patch A or patch B first, you'll get the same result. Another result of the design based on inexact patching is that you can, for example, cherrypick a change that modifies a file without first getting the change that *creates* the file
the "Theory of Patches" is described in further detail @ http://abridgegame.org/darcs/manual/node8.html