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

[Michał Górny]

Dnia 2014-03-30, o godz. 09:56:45
Joshua Kinard <kumba@g.o> napisał(a):

> 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.

Don't you think this would be a serious overkill?

If choice for this were to be provided, it should probably land
in glibc's LC_MEASUREMENT. Though I'm not sure if that would help
something since most of the countries seem to support the binary
prefixes. At least the countries using the metric system.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny