I generally agree, Josh, but I think readline is getting pointed at a bit too much. Yeah, it's a bad one, but we also include other stuff like zlib that doesn't commonly come up as an issue.
I'd argue something just a wee bit different... By the time we would add in: - autoconf rules to detect it, - makefile rules to link it in - include file changes - wrappers to ensure use of pmalloc - Debian guys add build dependancies - rpm dependencies get added - BSD ports dependencies That is likely rather more code than 1 not terribly large file of C needed to do it ourselves. And this code is rather worse, as it is in a bunch of languages, spread all over. If we were gaining a lot of extra functionality "for free" it would be one thing. That is true for libssl, and likely zlib, but not here.
