[omniORB] Autoconf/automake and corba (was: Re: [tao-users] Need Advice)

[Dan Kegel]

Ossama Othman wrote:
> > There's been some motion on at least Autoconf support for corba progams;
> 
> Indeed.  I've seen motions come and go over the years.

Yes, but anything before 2000 was doomed by lack of good
books, good free compilers, and good free implementations of
Corba :-)  In the modern era, where we have all three, there's
much more incentive for people to come up with solutions
to the 'how do you make it easy to portably build corba programs'.

> > I'm using [the corbaconf.kiev.ua]
> > autoconf macros to detect Tao or Omniorb.  I'm not using his
> > idl file dependency generator script yet, but I might start.
> 
> I once tried KDE's scripts back when they still used CORBA, but didn't
> have much luck.  I'd be interested in your findings with corbaconf.

Rough, but useful.  I am trying to help him polish them.

They currently let the IDL compiler use whatever suffixes it wants
for filenames; I think it'd be a lot cleaner to use idl options
to force the idl compiler to output uniform filenames across all orbs.
I see that tao's idl compiler has options -hc, -hs, etc. to do this.
Omniorb's doesn't, but I bet it'd be easy to add them.

Time to make corba programs easy to build, that's what I say.
- Dan