beecrypt,zlib, and elfutils have been in and out of the RPM tarball, as the product has evolved, and stabilized (both rpm, and the others ;)). These subdirectories are stale, and unmaintained, and cause hard-to-solve and unneeded build problems on certain architectures, and with later headers and compilers. All the releases at RH which used this are now out of support. Would it be possible to 'nuke' this cruft away, and remove this trap for the unwary. thanks --
Beecrypt, zlib, and elfutils are ib CVS because they contain splint and doxygen annotations that are useful for maintaining rpm. zlib has had, and will have again, tunings for performance speedups appropriate for rpm, but inappropriate in general. elfutils is included in CVS to assist non-linux elf platforms with porting. Ditto beecrypt. Both have fragile and complicated API's that are tricky to get correct. The sub-directories are included or not as needed and appropriate. Yes, external is preferred on current linux platforms; that is not true for legacy linux distributions nor non-linux.