char (un)signedness

["J.H.M. Dassen (Ray)" <dm zensunni demon nl>]

Folks,

First of all, congratulations on the 1.0 release (packaging it up now) and
best wishes for the new year!

I recently received a bug report (http://bugs.debian.org/127009) pointing
out that gnumeric may have issues on arm, powerpc and s390 due to a wrong
assumption regarding char's signedness (char is unsigned by default on those
architectures).

AFAIK, there are two ways to deal with this
- compile -fsigned-char
- make a large number of small changes to gnumeric's source (primarily 
  changing types and adding casts)

I'd appreciate advice on what the right way is here. The first seems like
the easy way out (and I'll probably use that for the Debian packages for
now, unless someone can provide a reason why this is not a good idea), but
the second feels like the clean solution.

Greetings,
Ray
-- 
I'm really not a very nice person. I can say "I don't care" with a straight
face, and really mean it.
        Linus Torvalds on the linux-kernel list