I've used npm but an not familiar with these kinds of details of it. There would seem to be some potential putfalls, such as two libraries accessing a single system resource (a config file, a system socket, etc.). I will take a look into this though. Thanks.

npm works around some problems like this with a concept of "peer dependencies" which are dependencies that can only be depended on once. The typical dependency, though, is scoped to the package that requires it.