Amit Dovev

The only **big endian** architecture that is supported by LTS Linux distros is s390x (IBM Mainframe).

IMO, we can just drop the big endian support.

Tesseract has no SIMD support for s390x, so It's a huge waste of time and money to run Tesseract on IBM mainframes.

@stweil, can you comment about this issue?

Since we are going to keep the BE support, maybe we should test it regularly with GitHub actions using QEMU. https://github.com/uraimo/run-on-arch-action

>I doubt that there are critical applications using Tesseract OCR on big endian machines which would justify more efforts. That's why I thought we can drop it...

>Drop endianness check and swapping when reading data on LE machines.... models which were created on a big endian machine... must be rejected with an error message. How can you...

OK, I think I found the answer. Only check once during model loading. https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract/blob/d1912d70100d6e13ff0241c478735bbca7256d1e/src/ccutil/tessdatamanager.cpp#L120

@stweil, I don't think we should bother with step 2 and 3. What about doing just step 1? Another option is to keep the current code without doing any change...

See #3925.