On Tue, Mar 27, 2001 at 06:59:30PM -0500, Christos Zoulas wrote:
> On Mar 28,  2:16am, pooka@iki.fi (Antti Kantee) wrote:
> -- Subject: Re: CVS commit: basesrc
> 
> | I built the database on sparc and alpha, ran both through strings, and
> | took a diff and there's stuff like this in there:
> | 
> | -KCAH
> | +HACK
> | 
> | Something is wrong somewhere (maybe in me? ;)
> 
> Well, the databases are endian neutral, not big endian or little endian
> for efficiency. I.e. building on the sparc will produce a big endian
> database, building on the i386 will produce a little endian database.
> Both the sparc and the i386 can read both databases. But if you have
> a network of i386's why you should spend extra time byte-swapping?

This is similar to what X PCF fonts do, FWIW.  (And DB, come to think of
it.)