Applications and bundled libraries

Simple, abort build saying libevent x.y.z is needed, distributors will
figure it out.

>icu: we need a more recent version than was even provided on Karmic.

Same here.

>libjingle: upstream appears to be unmaintained.

Huh, what about asking your own company to support its own code ?

> sqlite: we added full-text indexing (now upstream) and several
>performance improvements which are rather specific to our use case. We
>don't want to do without them and upstream aren't too interested.

Contact distributors and ask them to add your patches to the system
libraries.