[omniORB] ORB_init returns None (Python)

[Peter Gebauer]

> > In my client code the ORB_init sometimes returns "None", the equivalent of
> > null in C. The documentation says nothing about that it would ever return 
> > None, so why does it?
> 
> What are you doing at the time?  I've never seen that happen. Are you
> doing interesting things with import hooks or playing with
> sys.modules?  What platform are you using?

I'm not doing anything in particular. This code is called from a mod_python
handler. I think the problem occurs when the handler is reloaded 
upon which the module variable __orb__ is set to None. My code is:

  if not __orb__:
	__orb__ = ORB_Init([], CORBA.ORB_ID)

so it would be safe had the ORB_init always returned a valid object.
I looked at both the OmniORB4 library and Python bindings source codes and
it seems it should always return an ORB, so it's defenately a bug, I just 
don't know where to look for it.

The second thing I noticed is that the OmniORBpy documentation says it works 
with OmniORB version 3 or 2.8, but the Debian packages I'm running is 
OmniORB version 4. The OmniORBpy package even depends on it.
So, I'm wondering, is the documentation for OmniORBpy outdated or has the 
Debian maintainer for python2.3-omniorb made a huge mistake?
It should also be noted that Debian testing (sarge) doesn't even include 
older versions of OmniORB than OmniORB version 4 (4.0.4).

/Peter