$Id$

Portability
-----------

Portability is a library used by the Network Weather System (NWS). It
aims to be portable and to mask sockets, threads and other low level,
system dependent calls. It can be used independetly from the NWS, but
documentation is quite scarse: the header files will be your best
friends. 

Compiling and installing
------------------------

To compile Portability run
	./configure 
	make all
and you will find a library libNwsPortability.a and the needed file in
the ./build-<your-architecture>/{lib,include}. You can install them with
	make install

You can configure where to install library and includes using --prefix
etc ... (./configure --help for the options).

You can configure Portability to be used with threads (--enable-threads)
and to disable sigalarm (--disable-sigalarm).



Adaptive Timeouts
-----------------

Some of Portability's functions take a timeout as argument. Portability
provides a way to use adaptive timeouts: look at timeouts.h for the
interface. In short you can use GetTimeOut to get a timeout estimate that
is more accurate the more information you give Portability through
SetTimeOut. If you call the Send{MessageAnd}Data with a timeout of -1
you'll get the adaptive timeouts without having to tinker with Get/Set
TimeOut.