Re: md5 lossage

[John Paul Wallington]

>     I previously reported that `md5' gives the wrong results on my debian
>     sparc box.  I find it isn't confined to that.  It's also wrong on
>     Solaris 8 and Irix 6.5 with recent sources, but OK on x86 debian and
>     redhat with various gcc versions and with cc on irix.  (It's also OK
>     generally on 21.3 as far as I can tell.)  Thus it looks like an endian
>     issue with the current code.
> 
> The file md5.c has not changed since the start of 2001, so if it
> did not have an endian problem in 21.3, I doubt it has one now.
> It seems to be designed to cope with endian issues.
> 
> I have a vague memory that the Sun and MIPS are 64-bit machines at
> least recently.  Could this be a 64-bit problem, perhaps?

The md5 functions work on my Debian GNU/Linux Apple PowerPC machine*
(which is big-endian and 32-bit), which further suggests a 64-bit
rather than endianness problem.

* at least, (md5 "foo")
             => "acbd18db4cc2f85cedef654fccc4a4d8"