Problem with Excel import on ARM

[Wookey <wookey aleph1 co uk>]

Hi people. I've just signed up to this list as I'm involved with a project
that wants to use Gnumeric on a small-form-factor device. I'll send a
another mail about how we can spend some time improving Gnumeric for use on
small screens, touchscreens etc, and looking for advice on the best ways to
minimise it's footprint.

Right now though I have a problem with the Excel import on an ARM CPU. The
simple sheet here: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/test/ (4 integers and four
labels) gets the numbers mangled when it is read in.

I'm trying to grok the gnumeric source in order to track this down. I'd like
to know how I can get to see the various debug messages that gnumeric
obviusly has in the excel import plugin. Do I run gnumeric with an option?
Do they appear in a logfile somewhere? Do I need to change compile-time
options (the code seems to default to having the debug messages present)?

Also is it possible to build the plugin in some kind of standalone/test
format?

And is it possible to see the results of such an import using some kind of
command-line thing, because right now there are difficulties getting X to
work on the ARM machine I am using for building and testing, and if I could
run something like gnumeric --ignore-display --import <foo.xls >result it
would speed up testing enormously.

I'm working with the Debian sources (it's a Debian-based system) so that's
gnumeric 1.2.11 and libgsf 1.8.2

The most likely cause of problem is either 
 
 1) the use of floating point bitfields (ARM uses an unusual format for C
 floats) that are generated by gnumeric itself rather than glibc, or

 2) a problem with endianness or assumptions about char being signed or
 unaligned byte array accesses which work on x86 but not ARM.
 
Any clues as to where I should be looking - which functions are involved in
reading this in - whether it's the plugin code itself or libgsf or stuff I
should read to understand what all this BIFF stuff is about would be greatly
appreciated.

TIA

Wookey
-- 
Aleph One Ltd, Bottisham, CAMBRIDGE, CB5 9BA, UK  Tel +44 (0) 1223 811679
work: http://www.aleph1.co.uk/     play: http://www.chaos.org.uk/~wookey/