Automatically downloading libraries for a module I have a small module on drupal.org.  Among a few other things, my module adds support for a third-party PHP library to Drupal.  Users are expected to download the module to .../libraries/ and the module provides helper functions, etc.

A few days ago I had a feature request come in.  Essentially, a user is asking for a way to automagically download the PHP library to .../libraries/ for use by the module.

Before I stamp this request as denied, I was curious whether there is a decent method to do this, and if there are any existing modules that already to this (so I can look at them for inspiration).
You can use drush make to do this, but that will only work if the person downloading the module is using drush make.

In your modulename.make file:

libraries[foolib][download][type] = "get"
libraries[foolib][download][url] = "http://path.to/file/or/tarball.gz


This is only advisable if you are grabbing libraries. Adding dependent modules here currently can cause version conflicts (although many modules supply this info via a modulename.make.example file).