Interestingly, other GNU projects (including bison) are no longer
distributing intl. So, I think I agree that zlib and libintl should not
be distributed.
While zlib would probably be only moderately painful to remove, I
recommend anyone who wants to attempt intl be very very careful. Our
version has a modified build system, and other directories get their
configuration information from it (config/gettext-sister.m4).
Yes, we should start using AM_GNU_GETTEXT instead if intl is removed.
The biggest pain I see in zlib is more aesthetic than anything else;
we'd need to disable libjava if it is not there, and this means that
we'd add one more test to the toplevel. Such tests really belong in the
front-end directories.
Paolo