[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#865191: [GenABEL-Project/ProbABEL] Failure of test suite for big endian architectures (#45)

[Andreas Tille]

Dear Lennart,

On Thu, Sep 14, 2017 at 02:19:52PM +0000, Lennart C. Karssen wrote:
> Thanks for the bug report. I remember we discussed this some time in the past on the debian-med mailing list, e.g. [here](https://lists.debian.org/debian-med/2015/07/msg00058.html) and earlier [here](https://lists.debian.org/debian-med/2014/01/msg00177.html). At the time we decided to exclude the affected architectures.

Sorry, I'm doing to much different things to remember every single issue
of a certain software. :-)

> The problem is that the binary input files were generated on a little-endian architecture and ProbABEL makes no attempt to check for endianness. The tests on big-endian machines would probably pass if input files were used that were also created on a big-endian machine. So, I guess the failing tests could be 'fixed'/worked around by providing big-endian input files and trying to detect endianness before running the tests.
> 
> However, I think all machines used for the kind of scientific analyses that ProbABEL does are little endian, therefore I'm not planning in fixing this any time soon (especially since the actual code will most likely work on big-endian machines if the input files were generated on the same architecture). 

So do you think it is a sensible solution to do the following:

if architecture in (mips, s390x, hppa, powerpc, ppc64, sparc64)
    make check || true
fi

in other words hiding our eyes for those architectures where the tests
are known to fail?

Kind regards

      Andreas.

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