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

Tue Jun 26 18:35:02 CEST 2012

'Twas brillig, and Christian Lohmaier at 26/06/12 16:51 did gyre and gimble:
+> Hi Colin, *,
+> 
+> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 5:14 PM, Colin Guthrie <mageia at colin.guthr.ie> wrote:
+>> 'Twas brillig, and Christian Lohmaier at 26/06/12 15:26 did gyre and gimble:
+>>
+>> What about if they transfer a file from OSX to Linux? OSX uses base 10:
+> 
+> can not confirm, see
+> http://frupic.frubar.net/25973
+
+Well I literally just confirmed it on the OSX box next to me, so take it
+as you like. It said, literally: "10.5MB on disk". This was both in
+finder itself in the little file preview and in the "Get Info" dialog
+which also showed the size in bytes in brackets.
+
+I'm not an expert but the above screen shot looks like a very old
+version of OSX.
+
+>> Personally I don't give a flying fig what's shown :)
+> 
+> I take that as you're not opposing a patch to change nautilus'
+> file-size-display.
+
+I'm saying I don't really care what's shown. If given the choice between
+maintaining patched downstream behaviour vs. unpatched upstream
+behaviour I'd take the latter seeing as it is cleaner and I don't
+personally care which is shown.
+
+So based purely on the principle of keeping downstream patching as light
+as possible, I'd be against such a change. I should point out that this
+is an opinion that is not based on the functionality of the change
+itself, just general principles, so I was deliberately trying not to
+voice a particular opinion on the functionality itself :)
+
+I don't think I ever use any summarised value for knowing anything more
+than the rough size of a file - if I need to know it's size properly, I
+use bytes - anything that displays things with an M or G suffix is an
+approximation to me and I don't really care if that approximation is
+somewhat ambiguous due to the base used).
+
+Col
+
+
+-- 
+
+Colin Guthrie
+colin(at)mageia.org
+http://colin.guthr.ie/
+
+Day Job:
+  Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/
+Open Source:
+  Mageia Contributor http://www.mageia.org/
+  PulseAudio Hacker http://www.pulseaudio.org/
+  Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/
+
+
+