I just felt the need to give forth my 2 cents on this topic:
I don't think that a "Unified Library" is the way to go.
Rather, PD and all of its libraries need to be placed in debian or RPM packages... easy installation, management, dependency resolution, etc will then be possible.
With a couple simple scripts and a howto we could make it very easy for authors to package up their externals.
The Demudi folks would probably be happy to include this stuff on their server/in the distro.
Unfortunately this won't help the Windows folk... All I can say on that is that life sucks when you are locked into a proprietary system... may as well compile a giant DLL and pray that everything works. *grin*
If someone has a lot of time on their hands, a package management system could be integrated directly into PD.
andy