port.h tests wrong macro for endianness

[mwhudson]

#include <Rconfig.h> // for WORDS_BIG_ENDIAN

// IS_LITTLE_ENDIAN, IS_BIG_ENDIAN
#if defined(WORDS_BIG_ENDIAN)

Unfortunately the macro defined (or not) by Rconfig.h is WORDS_BIGENDIAN.

[paleolimbot]

Thank you for reporting this! I'll make sure it's fixed in the next update.

[paleolimbot]

This will get fixed in #108. Do you have a preferred route for testing on big endian? As you can see, I haven't tested on big endian so support is mostly theoretical.

[mwhudson]

Well I uploaded a very similar patch to Ubuntu and the tests that were failing on s390x (our only big endian arch) in packages that depend on r-cran-wk started working again so things more or less work. I don't know how to test any more than that though!

[paleolimbot]

Good to know! Thank you again for reporting!

[mwhudson]

r-cran-wk's tests always fail though https://autopkgtest.ubuntu.com/packages/r/r-cran-wk/jammy/s390x. Looking at https://autopkgtest.ubuntu.com/results/autopkgtest-jammy/jammy/s390x/r/r-cran-wk/20211112_045709_fe996@/log.gz as a sort of representative failure suggests that it's just the data coming out in a different endianness than the tests expect. I did have a few seconds of poking and couldn't see a way to force the functions the tests are exercising to produce little endian output but I barely know R!

[paleolimbot]

I'll keep this open until I can test on big endian properly then. In theory the output is deterministic but I'm sure it isn't (or there's an error in my endian switching somewhere).

[paleolimbot]

Ok, I tested on s390x prior to release, but let me know if tests fail since I now have a setup to test!