Little endian /usr/share/locale/* files in epiphany-browser-data

[Mike Hommey]

On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 11:02:46AM +0100, Loïc Minier wrote:
>  (moving to -devel with a reply-to)
> 
> On Tue, Jan 20, 2009, Fabian Greffrath wrote:
> > Running the 'file' command on 
> > '/usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/epiphany.mo' reveals a "GNU message 
> > catalog (little endian), revision 0, 920 messages".
> > 
> > The 'little endian' part is fine, since this is an i386 system. But 
> > the file is content of the epiphany-browser-data package which is 
> > supposed to hold the architecture-independent data files for 
> > epiphany-browser. Since this package is also a dependency of 
> > epiphany-browser on powerpc (i.e. big endian), how is it possible this 
> > combination works resp. does it relly work on powerpc?
> > 
> > I am asking because I am currently working on the audacity package and 
> > would like to split out the content of /usr/share into an arch:all 
> > audacity-data package, when I just encountered this issue.
> 
>  The files will work on both little endian and big endian systems, but
>  there's a performance hit when the endianess differ (as the file can't
>  be used directly when it's mmap-ed).

How much performance loss are we looking at ? If it's a few %, is it
that important? There are already various things that are little-endian
even on big-endian architectures, beginning with the ext3 filesystem.

>  It's a bug, but it's not clear to me how we could fix this while not
>  losing too much space.
> 
>  Perhaps we could have a tool converting .mo files from one endianess to
>  the other and ship the two versions in epiphany-browser-data, then
>  patch gettext to loop up files in an endianess specific location first
>  e.g. gettext would look in /usr/share/locales/big-endian or
>  /little-endian first (depending on endianess), then in
>  /usr/share/locales.
> 
>  I'd rather not implement anything specific in epiphany-browser, it
>  would be best to discuss this more widely and come to a generic
>  solution for all arch: all packages.

IMHO, the real issue is that depending on the arch which the arch:all
package is built on, the resulting file's endianness will change.
Maybe msgfmt should be patched to always generate the same endianness
by default.

Mike