endian issues (mips)

[job bogan <job@piquin.uchicago.edu>]

so, i was thinking about requesting a mips area in the ftp hierarchy,
but...  mips cpus have ability to run in little or big endian
modes. (perhaps vax endian too??)  as well, we have at least 3 classes
of mips machines we could be running on - cobalt cube, sgis and
nt/pc'ish things (magnums and such).

i'm not sure how much the class of machine matters to binaries, but the
endianess almost surely matters.  does anyone know about much the
machine class matters?

so, how should we deal with this?  do we make a binary-mips-little and a
binary-mips-big?

(i'm working on some sgi indys, so i'm doing little-endian stuff)

thanks

job