Bug 228825 - sys-devel/autoconf-2.62: AC_C_BIGENDIAN misdetects ppc system as universal
Bug#: 228825 Product:  Gentoo Linux Version: 2007.0 Platform: PPC
OS/Version: Linux Status: RESOLVED Severity: critical Priority: P2
Resolution: FIXED Assigned To: base-system@gentoo.org Reported By: robbat2@gentoo.org
Component: Core system
URL:  http://www.mail-archive.com/bug-autoconf@gnu.org/msg01680.html
Summary: sys-devel/autoconf-2.62: AC_C_BIGENDIAN misdetects ppc system as universal
Keywords:  
Status Whiteboard: 
Opened: 2008-06-22 00:58 0000
Description:   Opened: 2008-06-22 00:58 0000 
This is mainly a heads up for PPC folk.

autoconf-2.62 has a badly broken AC_C_BIGENDIAN macro. Specifically, it detects
the endianess as universal instead of big.

As one of the side-effects of this, Xorg does not get the correct endianess
during compile at all: http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16171

Anything compiled with the broken autoconf, that has branches for compiling
different endian code (like _LOTS_ of X uses X_BYTE_ORDER), will need to be
recompiled :-(.

------- Comment #1 From SpanKY 2008-06-29 23:11:57 0000 ------- 
ive reverted the big endian macro in 2.62-r1 to the version in 2.61 ... this
will workaround the issue until we get a real fix from upstream

------- Comment #2 From Alexis Ballier 2008-07-20 10:12:50 0000 ------- 
Since I had bug #231670, that means this does not always fail at build time. I
was wondering if it would be possible to have a QA check that would print
warnings, if configure has been generated with autoconf 2.62 and AC_C_BIGENDIAN
is used. (considering upstream tarballs may have autofoo stuff generated by the
broken autoconf). That would at least point people to the culpit if something
is screwed up.

------- Comment #3 From SpanKY 2008-09-21 06:20:27 0000 ------- 
should be fixed with autoconf-2.63 in the tree