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

[Christian Lohmaier]

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