[Mageia-dev] What is Mageia's policy reagarding filesize display? (units/base 2 vs base 10)

Tue Jun 26 14:57:16 CEST 2012

Hi *,
+
+having installed Mageia 2 recently and not only peaked into it using
+the live-disk I noticed something that really bothers me a lot:
+
+* Nautilus uses base10 to display filesizes
+
+This to me is very annoying and contrary to all the previous years I
+have been using a computer. As I use both the commandline as well as
+the graphical filemanager, this discrepancy is driving me nuts.
+
+Apparently this did originate from ubuntu with their unit policy
+https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnitsPolicy which is rather flawed in my
+opinion.
+
+Why I fully support the idea to be clear about what value is
+represented, the only sensible way to do it would have been to change
+the units accordingly as opposed to the values. (as many comments also
+read)
+The policy even contradicts its own use-case. Bob is not able to
+compare the filesizes between ubuntu (nautilus) and windows
+(explorer), unless they patched nautilus to use base2, and that is
+contradicting their implementation requirements).
+##################################
+
+So what is Mageia's POV on this topic?
+
+* Would a patch against nautilus that restores base2 behavior be accepted?
+If not:
+* Do you think it is OK to have commandline tools show different
+values from GUI tools?
+* Do you think it is OK to display different numeric values than the
+rest of the computer world?
+
+Note that I don't question the use of correct units, i.e. 132 KiB for
+base2 and 135 kB for base10 - and I also don't question changing the
+default basis in any random software, but the use in the filemanager.
+
+Upstream very likely will not revert to base10 for nautilus
+https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665005 a after-the-change
+bug and https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=554172 a bug asking
+for clear values, i.e. matching units that resulted in keeping the
+unit and changing the base instead of the other way round, heated
+discussion, with not much consensus)
+
+ciao
+Christian
+