Ye my bad with readline.I saw it a lot during compiles and thought its iup/cd dependency.Now i am reading that its lua dependency , thats explains the whole connection to it.
chdkptp uses readline to provide command history in CLI mode. This is a compile time option you can turn off by setting READLINE_SUPPORT=0 in config.mk. I'm not aware that it specifically requires readline 6 rather than 7, but I haven't looked into it.
The Lua standalone interpreter can also use readline, but this shouldn't be relevant to chdkptp
libusb-0.1 is the USB API chdkptp uses to communicate with the camera. It's a legacy API, but changing to a different one would require a significant amount of work. AFAIK on linux versions it's just a compatibility wrapper over more recent APIs anyway. On windows, libusb-win32 only supports the 0.1 API, so a different library would need to be used.
There are good reasons to update the USB API, but it's not likely to be a simple project.
Bottom line is that these versions are getting old and some -not all- , some distros just keep them for compatibility purposes only.
As long as they are available and compatible, I don't see much reason to change. I'd much rather figure out why it's crashing.
edit:
OK, set up an ubuntu 16.10 VM. I understand the point about readline/libusb is that users will get load errors if the corresponding packages aren't installed. This is what you get trying to run pre-compiled binaries in linux.
I also get the segfault you described on on startup using the prebuilt build.