[R-pkg-team] Bug#1064135: bigmemory: fails to migrate to testing for too long: autopkgtest fails on arm*, ppc64el and s390x

[Charles Plessy]

Hi all,

I am trying to pass -fsigned-char to the compiler when building the 
package but failed to do it by adding a src/Makevars file.  (see patch 
below).  What is the standard approach?

Description: Force signed characters
  bigmemory passes the tests on CRAN's arm64 platforms, which all run on 
MacOS.
  In Debian, r-cran-bigmemory fails on arm64 and a lot of other 
architectures.
  In my understanding, char is signed on macos-arm64 and linux amd64 
(x86_64) and
  unsigned on linux arm64.  This patch passes -fsigned-char to the compiler.
Author: Charles Plessy <plessy at debian.org>
Bug-Debian: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1064135
Forwarded: https://github.com/kaneplusplus/bigmemory/issues/115
Last-Update: 2025-05-07

--- /dev/null
+++ r-cran-bigmemory-4.6.4/src/Makevars
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+CXXFLAGS = -fsigned-char

Cheers,

Charles