media-libs/x264 endianess patch: Why?

[dallenwilson]

First off, thanks for setting up Discussions. Getting this answered wasn't worth adding noise to the open issue, in my opinion.

gentooLTO adds a patch to media-libs/x264 which conflicts with a gentoo-provided patch, details are in issue #538. The solution was to update the patch but require us to use the x264-9999 live ebuild.

I don't claim to be a great programmer, and I may be missing something obvious here, but: Why do we need this patch? It's patching what appears to be a one-off compilation (during the configure phase, no less. Not even the makefile proper!) to determine the machine's endianness. Endianness is machine-dependant; The result is not going to change if the check uses lto or not.

It doesn't look like this patch will change/affect whether or not the x264 library as a whole is complied with LTO. If I'm wrong there, kindly point out where. Learning things is useful.

Wouldn't a better/simpler solution be removing the patch, rather than playing the arms race game with the gentoo patcheset and mucking around with live ebuilds?