The Demudi folks already have! I have a debian package here called "pd-externals" and put together by Guenter Geiger, which includes a whole lot of externals: ggee, ext13, zexy, plugin~, ann,... But probably not in the newest versions, and that would be a problem for any packager:
Yeah.. I know... I've got those .debs. The problem is that they are very out of date (pd 0.33)... also there is no pd-dev package w/ appropriate headers... its just not enough to maintain a decent pd install purely within the confines of the apt- system.
Furthermore pd-externals contains a whole slew of different libraries, which is bad from the maintenance point of view, IMHO.
A good example is the xmms packages. There is no 'xmms-plugins' package, rather each plugin has its own package. Very clean that way... instead of pd-externals we should have pd-zexy, pd-ggee, pd-gem, pd-iemlib, etc. Of course not everything will be packaged nicely but the major libs could be.
Maybe when I've got time I'll stop advocating and start packaging ... but not now. ;)
think all externals are announced here. So maybe if we could agree on a new tag in the subject line instead of [announce] for external announcements like [EXTERNAL], one could automatically create a list of new externals from the mailing list archives.
Now that is a great idea!
andy