Sorry if this comes across as a bit trollish, but this issue has been bugging me for quite some time. Tonight, I was playing with two packages, rTorrent and Privoxy. Unfortunately, Privoxy is lacking zlib support, and rTorrent is lacking XMLRPC support (both are compile time options). Now, I realize OpenWRT packages need to be minimalistic, but I'm starting to wonder about the logic in leaving out certain components...
For Privoxy, without zlib compression filtering won't work on compressed pages. HTTP compression has been out for a little over a decade now, and is pretty much the rule rather than the exception. You can modify your HTTP headers to disable it, but downloading uncompressed HTML takes about ten times longer. Now, as far as I know, Privoxy's claim to fame is the ability to filter webpages to make them load more quickly... OpenWRT's package can't do this, so I'm not really sure why one would want to use a Privoxy build that can't filter over one of the other, simpler proxy servers.
For rTorrent, XMLRPC seems to be a requirement to use any of the various web GUIs. Now, I suppose rTorrent works alright without a web GUI, but personally I'd rather control it from a webpage rather than ssh'ing into my router and keeping the ssh connection open for the next week or so while it downloads. In any case, it seems like web GUIs on routers are popular enough to justify a larger binary and an extra dependency...
I would presume there are more packages missing rather vital features, but these are the ones I've found with the latest Kamikaze build without explicitly looking. Now, I'm kinda wondering about the logic here... Is it just negligence on the part of the package creator in not reading up on the various compile options? Or are these exclusions deliberate for reasons of which I'm ignorant?
(My logic in posting this: If it's the former then it can be corrected for future builds and other packages, if it's the latter then I won't need to waste my time in attempting to recompile these two packages.)