Le Mon, Mar 23, 2026 at 05:11:00PM +0100, Frank Heimes a écrit :
I also searched (on a high level) through the release notes: https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/NEWS.html and couldn't find a stmt indicating that either big endian is not longer supported or that 32-bit support got dropped upstream
Hi Frank and everyone, For the benefit of other readers: momentum is building around restoring big‑endian support for R libraries, following discussions on other mailing lists, and Frank has now been brought into the loop. I’d like to clarify one point regarding architecture support across the R ecosystem. The core R package (r-base in Debian) still builds on a wide range of architectures. However, the official documentation already states that 32‑bit CPUs are no longer supported: https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/r-release/R-admin.html#Sub_002darchitectures Beyond R itself, there are thousands of packages written in R, often with C or C++ components (and occasionally Rust or Julia). Most of these are distributed through two curated repositories, CRAN and Bioconductor. Both test their packages exclusively on Windows, macOS, and Linux amd64. In practice, this means that bugs on these platforms are caught upstream, while issues specific to other architectures—such as 32‑bit or big‑endian systems—are discovered by third parties like us. In that sense, upstream support for those architectures is effectively absent. Have a nice day, Charles -- Charles Plessy Nagahama, Yomitan, Okinawa, Japan Debian Med packaging team http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med Tooting from work, https://fediscience.org/@charles_plessy Tooting from home, https://framapiaf.org/@charles_plessy
