Russ Allbery <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> I don't remember now where I originally read this (I thought it was in the
> autoconf manual, but I can't find it now), but I seem to recall that the
> theory behind the autoconf endianness test was that it could fail to
> decide and that any program that could be cross-compiled and cared about
> endianness had to be prepared to test endianness at run-time. Which would
> imply that it should be possible to use the AC_C_BIGENDIAN macro with a
> package that supports cross-compilation and have it return some sort of
> indeterminate result.
Yeah, this is a reasonable way of handling cross-compiling and
endianess. But it's not the way that AC_C_BIGENDIAN works since it
just defines a single preprocessor symbol and fails when
cross-compiling. And lots of times it's much better to be able to
figure out endianess at compile-time, so I think we should try to that
as much as possible.
/assar