The "external" package is really just a convenient location to place related libraries built outside of the ACEware system, such as the CRIS SOFT library. We have placed libsoftcris.a in the pkgs/external/lib/ directory and various header files like softcris.h in the pkgs/external/include/ directory. You may decide to place such libraries elsewhere, but the software developed at Caltech which uses such libraries will look in the "external" location for them, so you may want to create links therein to your installations or you will need to modify make files occasionally in order for such software to find these libraries...
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