[omniORB] Patches to compile OO4 on AIX

[Carl Thompson]

Duncan Grisby wrote:

> On Wednesday 14 November, Carl Thompson wrote:
> 
>>      Note that I had to hack up src/tool/omniidl/cxx/idlpython.cc a bit 
>>because the Python method that was used to find the libraries did not seem 
>>to work in all cases.  I don't know Python so I fixed it using C++ code.
> 
> Can you explain what the problem was?  I'm sure it's possible to do
> whatever has to be done from Python rather than uglifying the C++.


There were actually a couple of different problems.  First, the Python 
"sys.executable" seems to want get the path of the Python interpreter rather 
than the name of the program being executed (omniidl).  I forget on which 
platform I noticed this (Windows or AIX) but on that platform the Python 
code simply did not come up with the right name in all circumstances.  I was 
able to fix this by using argv[0] in C++.  Second, the Python code assumed 
that the omniidl binary would be installed in path_to_omniorb/bindir/archdir 
when figuring out where to look for Python library files but I needed to 
install it in path_to_omniorb/bindir so that the paths are the same on 
different platforms.  Since I suspect others may need to install this way 
too, I added a check for this (in Python) which notices if the archdir looks 
like a bindir and fixes bindir in this case.


> With the AIX stuff, is it possible to build a Python extension with
> gcc, rather than making omniidl an executable?  That would be a
> cleaner solution. 


I couldn't get this to work.  AIX dynamic libraries are _very_ strange and 
different from other platforms and I was not able to get this working at 
all.  Also, I had to compile omniORB with GCC but Python was compiled with 
IBM's compiler and apparently that introduces some imcompatibilities.

> Also, it looks like you have set paths up for using
> a Python build tree, rather than installing Python somewhere. I think
> that's why you need the PYTHONLIBDIR path. Is that right?


The Python I used was from an installation not a build tree.  I install it 
into my omniORB build tree when I build omniORB.  Depending on the 
installation package used i suppose the paths could be different depending 
on the package.  The package I use came from the (popular?) Bull's AIX 
software site at http://freeware.bull.net/ .

> Cheers,
> 
> Duncan.


Thanks,
Carl Thompson