[R] ifultools on ppc debian

[Moshe Olshansky]

Hi Stephen,

The error message clearly says what is wrong.
Big Endian and Little Endian are two ways of storing data (mostly often double precision numbers) in memory. A double precision number occupies two blocks of 4 bytes each. On Big Endian machines (most machines which are not Intel) if the memory address of a double precision number is X then it's sign, exponent and more significant part of the mantissa start at address X and the less significant part of the mantissa starts at X+4, while on Little Endian machines (x86 and alike) the less significant part of the mantissa starts at X and the sign, exponent and most significant part of the mantissa start at X+4.
In order to get better performance some programs directly manipulate the bit pattern of the number and to do this correctly they must know whether they are run on a Big Endian or Little Endian machine. So your program is apparently looking at /usr/include/bits/endian.h to check this. You should edit this file and comment (or #undefine) the Endian which is NOT what you got. 

Good luck!

Moshe.

--- On Wed, 15/7/09, stephen sefick <ssefick at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: stephen sefick <ssefick at gmail.com>
> Subject: [R] ifultools on ppc debian
> To: r-help at r-project.org
> Received: Wednesday, 15 July, 2009, 12:04 PM
> I have tried to compile this from
> source.  I don't know what Endianess
> is, but it is probably not debian power pc.  Am I
> would of luck with
> this package?
> 
> Stephen Sefick
> 
> * Installing *source* package ‘ifultools’ ...
> ** libs
> gcc -std=gnu99 -I/usr/local/lib/R/include
> -I"../inst/include/"
> -D"MUTIL_STATIC" -D"DEF_TF" -D"INTERRUPT_ENABLE"
> -D"NDEBUG"
> -D"USE_RINTERNALS" -I/usr/local/include   
> -fpic  -g -O2 -c
> RS_fra_dim.c -o RS_fra_dim.o
> In file included from /usr/include/endian.h:37,
>              
>    from /usr/include/sys/types.h:217,
>              
>    from /usr/include/stdlib.h:320,
>              
>    from /usr/local/lib/R/include/R.h:28,
>              
>    from ../inst/include/ut_type.h:18,
>              
>    from ../inst/include/fra_dim.h:9,
>              
>    from RS_fra_dim.c:20:
> /usr/include/bits/endian.h:27:4: error: #error Both
> BIG_ENDIAN and
> LITTLE_ENDIAN defined!
> make: *** [RS_fra_dim.o] Error 1
> ERROR: compilation failed for package ‘ifultools’
> * Removing ‘/home/ssefick/ifultools.Rcheck/ifultools’
> 
> -- 
> Stephen Sefick
> 
> Let's not spend our time and resources thinking about
> things that are
> so little or so large that all they really do for us is
> puff us up and
> make us feel like gods.  We are mammals, and have not
> exhausted the
> annoying little problems of being mammals.
> 
>            
>            
>         -K. Mullis
> 
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