On 26 Mar 2003, Alexandre Julliard wrote:
No there's no standard, and there's no defined Win32 API on big endian machines. It's not clear what is the right thing to do, currently we use native endianness in Wine, which means a different .res format. This implies that we need to be able to specify which one we want, if only to allow cross-compilation.
Yes, as I noted, I realized that the option would be needed if we use native endianess. But I would strongly argue that this is Not Right (TM). FS design has tought us that data should be stored in a single endianess. It makes sense -- you could move the file from one machine to the other, etc.
I think the right thing to do is: -- modify Wine to always read stuff in little endian -- remove the option, and force little endian output
If MS ever decides to support big endian arches, and they do the wrong thing, we have all the code in there, we can add the option back with a few lines of code. But currently we are defaulting to the least likely option, and the least desirable at the same time.