[Octave-bug-tracker] [bug #58457] [octave forge] (io) dbfread/dbfwrite failure on big-endian systems

[Rafael Laboissiere]

Follow-up Comment #4, bug #58457 (project octave):

The dbase file (.dbf) format specification
<https://www.dbase.com/Knowledgebase/INT/db7_file_fmt.htm> indicates that 16-
and 32-bit numbers should be written with least significant byte first.

So, my patch is indeed simplistic, but it does fix the problem on s390x,
powerpc and ppc64.  The bug was revealed by a unit test in the mapping
package, which was exercised at build time of the octave-mapping Debian
packages (s390x
<https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=octave-mapping&arch=s390x&ver=1.4.0-1&stamp=1590657250&raw=0>,
powerpc
<https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=octave-mapping&arch=powerpc&ver=1.4.0-2&stamp=1590683314&raw=0>,
and ppc64
<https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=octave-mapping&arch=ppc64&ver=1.4.0-1&stamp=1587339352&raw=0>,
respectively). The build is now working for the three architectures (s390x
<https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=octave-mapping&arch=s390x&ver=1.4.0-2&stamp=1590681588&raw=0>,
powerpc
<https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=octave-mapping&arch=powerpc&ver=1.4.0-2&stamp=1590683314&raw=0>,
and ppc64
<https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=octave-mapping&arch=ppc64&ver=1.4.0-2&stamp=1590682980&raw=0>,
respectively).

As regards the need for a similar fix in line 267 of dbfread.m, I really do
not know. It seems that only 8-bit chars are read from .dbt files, so I would
say that there is no need for a fix here.

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