This file provides some pointers to port omniORB3 to a new platform.

It should be straightforward to port omniORB3 to any platform which
support POSIX style threads, BSD style sockets and has a decent C++
compiler which supports exceptions and templates. The description
below assumes the port is to a unix platform but the information
provided is valid for any platforms.

To start a port, you must create a platform configuration file in
./mk/platforms for the new platform. It is better to copy an existing
one and modify to suit the new platform. Next, edit the file
./mk/config.mk to set the platform variable to the new platform.
Suppose you have created a new file called x_y_z.mk. You should put a
line like this in ./mk/config.mk:

platform = x_y_z

The makefiles in the distribution only work with GNUmake. Make sure
that you have the program installed.

The libraries and programs in omniORB3 are configured by a number of
CPP macros specified as compiler flags and in several header
files. The details are as follows:

1. Platform specific macros

   Each platform must be provided with three macros to identify the
   OS, the CPU and the OS version. For instance, the compiler flags
   for the supported platforms are:

   Solaris 2.5/ Sparc      | -D__sunos__ -D__sparc__ -D__OSVERSION__=5 -DSVR4
   Digital Unix 3.2/ Alpha | -D__osf1__ -D__alpha__ -D__OSVERSION__=3
   Linux 2.0/ x86          | -D__linux__ -D__x86__ -D__OSVERSION__=2


2. Porting omniidl

   omniidl requires Python 1.5.2 or higher, which is available from

     http://www.python.org/download/

   You can also get the source tarball from

     ftp://ftp.uk.research.att.com/pub/omniORB/python/py152.tgz

   On Unix platforms, omniidl is a shared library which is dynamically
   loaded by Python. It should be relatively easy to come up with the
   make rules to build the shared library, based upon the existing
   platforms.

   If you have difficulties building a shared library omniidl, you can
   build an executable which is statically linked to the Python
   interpreter. See the make rules for Windows to see how to do that.

   You must set the make variable PYTHON to the full path of your
   Python interpreter.


3. Porting omnithread library

   The file ./include/omnithread.h should be edited to include #if
   conditionals that can uniquely identify the new platform and to
   include the appropriate implementation-specific header file.

   There are different POSIX threads implementations that conform to
   different draft versions. The following compiler flags should be
   used to identify the exact versions:

   o -DPthreadDraftVersion=<x>  (e.g. x = 10 for Solaris 2.5)
   o -DPthreadSupportThreadPriority
   o -DNoNanoSleep


4. Porting omniORB3 library

   The file ./include/omniORB3/CORBA_sysdep.h contains #if
   conditionals that define the size of primitive data types, CPU
   endian and other platform specific information. You should add to
   this file the information about the new platform.


Good Luck.
