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

[Colin Guthrie]

'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
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http://colin.guthr.ie/

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