I thought there was a reason involving licensing, but I can't find any hint of it now. If we don't force LIBGD to no in configparms, we get the memusage script and memusagestat binary, which are quite handy. I imagine we'd need to create a new package for them, since having libc6-dev (is that the appropriate place?) depend on libgd2 might be uncool, but that's not hard to do.
-- Daniel Jacobowitz MontaVista Software Debian GNU/Linux Developer