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

[Loïc Minier]

 (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).

 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.

    Cheers,
-- 
Loïc Minier