this change is motivated by the intersection of several factors.
presently, despite being a nonstandard header, endian.h is exposing
the unprefixed byte order macros and functions only if _BSD_SOURCE or
_GNU_SOURCE is defined. this is to accommodate use of endian.h from
other headers, including bits headers, which need to define structure
layout in terms of endianness. with time64 switch-over, even more
headers will need to do this.
at the same time, the resolution of Austin Group issue 162 makes
endian.h a standard header for POSIX-future, requiring that it expose
the unprefixed macros and the functions even in standards-conforming
profiles. changes to meet this new requirement would break existing
internal usage of endian.h by causing it to violate namespace where
it's used.
instead, have the arch's alltypes.h define __BYTE_ORDER, either as a
fixed constant or depending on the right arch-specific predefined
macros for determining endianness. explicit literals 1234 and 4321 are
used instead of __LITTLE_ENDIAN and __BIG_ENDIAN so that there's no
danger of getting the wrong result if a macro is undefined and
implicitly evaluates to 0 at the preprocessor level.
the powerpc (32-bit) bits/endian.h being removed had logic for varying
endianness, but our powerpc arch has never supported that and has
always been big-endian-only. this logic is not carried over to the new
__BYTE_ORDER definition in alltypes.h.
Rich Felker
97d35a552e