Re: [gentoo-project] Call for agenda items - Council meeting 2014-04-08

[Joshua Kinard]

On 03/30/2014 05:23, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 4:33 AM, Michał Górny <mgorny@g.o> wrote:
>>
>> ISO/IEC prefixes [1,2]: KiB (kibibyte), MiB (mebi-), GiB (gibi-)
>>   -- unambiguously 2^10, 2^20, 2^30
>>
>> 'old' prefixes: kB (kilobyte), MB (mega-), GB (giga-)
>>   -- can mean 10^3 or 2^10 etc. depending on author's intention
>>   -- SI people tend to use 10^N for consistency with other units
>
> To think that counting is the one situation where it is actually
> possible to have perfect precision, and we still manage to mess up the
> units...
>
> I'm a bit torn on this.  I'm an American, so I am supposed to do
> something ambiguous and arbitrary (can we count bytes in baker's
> dozens?).  I'm also a Chemist, and never met an SI unit I didn't like.
>
> We do need to keep in mind that the laws of physics dictate that
> boolean states can only be combined in groups of 8.  That's a shame,
> because kibibits just rolls off the tongue and helps promote healthy
> fur.
>
> Now I need to get back to sleep because I have a 97.7 kibimeter drive
> tomorrow...

I'm on the side of using the old prefixes.  I just never groked the base-10
forms.  Since Gentoo is all about choice, why not make it configurable?
Maybe a USE flag or some other switch in make.conf that can be read by
Portage to let you choose if you want natural computer size presentations
(old prefix) or the human-friendly ones (new prefixes).  We've obviously got
the code for both forms in the referenced eclass, so just wrap it in a
conditional based on the chosen switch.  That laves the debate up to which
value is the default.

That said, I assume the six-fingered man might have an entirely different
opinion on this matter.

-- 
Joshua Kinard
Gentoo/MIPS
kumba@g.o
4096R/D25D95E3 2011-03-28

"The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us.  And
our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between."

--Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic