30 September 2002
Started working on a new binding for ORBit2 about a week ago. The existing orbit-python port to ORBit2 is a little crufty, and doesn’t take advantage of the new features in ORBit2. So far things have looked fairly promising, but I have turned up a number of ORBit2 bugs related to the use of typelibs. Some of them are pretty weird (such as bug 93928 and bug 94513), while others indicate defficiencies in the current typelib implementation itself (bug 93725). I don’t know if I will be able to get it to a usable state when compiled with ORBit2 2.4.x, so I might have to wait til GNOME 2.2 before using these in the GNOME Python bindings.
Other than the bugs, I have a mostly working client side binding that generates stubs at runtime from typelibs, and have a little code for the server side. I am looking at doing a custom object adaptor at the moment, rather than getting it to work with the POA (it won’t prevent using POA in the future). The API would probably be as simple as “objref = create_servant(repo_id, instance)“, which would create and activate a new servant that delegated all method calls to instance (which could be of any class — the only constraint being that it implement the required methods), and returned an object reference. This should be enough for most cases.
Weird Bug Reports
Some people send in very weird bug reports. This morning, I received bug 94576 which seems to have nothing to do with the package it was filed against, has a stack trace from some weird custom app (I guess), and talks about Anna Kournikova a bit. I don’t know why people send in bug reports that are obviously useless — it is a waste of their time and mine.