3.0.9 fails to build with sphinx on ppc64 (64bit, Big Endian)

[ernsteiswuerfel]

Tried building from 3.0.9 tarball which fails when sphinx is enabled. Machine is a Talos II, Gentoo ppc64. This problem is around since at least 3.0.4 (see Gentoo downstream bug report: https://bugs.gentoo.org/662944).
config.log
build.log

./configure --enable-sphinx --with-mysql
make
[...]
imap/search_sphinx.c: In function ‘generate_query’:
imap/search_sphinx.c:432:9: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘assert’ [-Wimplicit-function-declaration]
         assert(on->children == NULL);
         ^~~~~~
imap/search_sphinx.c:432:9: note: ‘assert’ is defined in header ‘<assert.h>’; did you forget to ‘#include <assert.h>’?
imap/search_sphinx.c:75:1:
+#include <assert.h>
 
imap/search_sphinx.c:432:9:
         assert(on->children == NULL);
         ^~~~~~
imap/search_sphinx.c: In function ‘sphinx_basedir’:
imap/search_sphinx.c:783:27: error: storage size of ‘parts’ isn’t known
     struct mboxname_parts parts;

[elliefm]

Cyrus's support for the Sphinx search engine is unmaintained (and has already been removed from the master branch), and I don't think any of the current maintainers know much about it...

If you're able to reproduce this in a bisect and identify the commit where it stopped building, I might be able to produce a patch that will make it build. But, I have no idea if it even works when it does build...

I'd recommend using the Xapian search engine instead, if for no other reason than it's being actively maintained!

[ernsteiswuerfel]

Checked out cyrus-imapd-3.0.0-beta1 in git, which fails with the same error. So it seems cyrus-imapd-3 never actually built with spinx on ppc/ppc64.

On 2.5.7 there's only ./configure --with-mysql, but no --enable-sphinx.