if you have a problem, take it up with him and be sure you have a compelling argument
The argument is invalid for source tarballs because
1. we don't provide recent ones 90% of the time.
2. those who do provide them include them.
3. anyone dumb enough to distribute one without the required externs inclluded needs a head examination
4. FEX can be disabled, its not required if it is unwanted.
5. a wget type tool can be executed from the cmake script to pull any required externals that aren't included in the tarball.
FEX is not a common oss library thus it is not packaged by open source operating system distributors. That means if we ever want VBA-M to be packaged in OS distributions, we need to embed it in our main source tree, since fex is a dependency.
The "dependencies" folder is outside of our main source tree thus it cant be used when building from a source tarball (for packaging).
zlib and SFML from the "dependencies" folder are only used when building the win32 port. All the other ports only use system libraries.
Having FEX somewhere within the "trunk" folder is REQUIRED for packaging, moving it elsewhere is NOT AN OPTION. Please live with it.
bgk