fun fact about ICU +universal

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Feb 14, 2021, at 20:11, Fred Wright wrote:

> On Sun, 14 Feb 2021, Ken Cunningham wrote:
> 
>> The i386/x86_64 universal build looks fine too, so far, with all the
>> muniveral stuff out.
>> 
>> Now -- have to see why it was ever put in there in the first place, I guess.
> 
> One of the typical sources of trouble with "natural universal" builds is architecture-dependent configure checks, whose results are inherently forced to be single-valued across architectures.  Since arm64 and x86_64 have both the same bitness and the same endianness, it might be a non-issue for that combination in many cases, even while being technically incorrect.  If i386/x86_64 also works, that suggests that bitness isn't an issue, but endianness would be if ppc were included.  Alignment is another potential issue, but less likely to be in these cases.
> 
> Though another problem with this sort of issue is that merely building successfully doesn't verify that the code actually works correctly. Remember Apple was shipping Intel Macs to end users before they'd fixed all the endian bugs.

Thank you, Fred, you said everything I was going to say.