On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 2:53 AM, Stefan Hundhammer
On Donnerstag, 5. Februar 2009, Jan Kupec wrote:
What about the attached diff to ByteCount.cc as part of fixing https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=471335 ?
That bug is a request by a community member to do something which I think is utterly stupid. Why would we want to do that?
I think you're confused. When I say "this package is a MB", what do you think? 1024 KB, right? Well other people (*cough* hardware manufacturers *cough*) use it to mean mega (as in million) bytes. 1 million bytes. As it's around 5% smaller. So to avoid the confusion, people have adopted the term KiB, MiB etc to denote it's base 2 not based 10. You'll notice many projects have adopted the standard. I have KDE telling me a particular file is 106.7MiB not 106.7MB. Most partitioning tools have adopted it too. And also in computer science we exclusively use the KiB, MiB etc. scheme as it's not good enough being ambiguous. I agree with you, that it's utterly stupid that we need two sets of units for describing computer storage. But I also think it's become essential. If zypper is telling me, that I'm installing 1 GB of software -- is that 1,073,741,824 bytes or is it 1,000,000,00 bytes? It's a non trivial difference :)
And why would we rush ahead to do it when there is one single person requesting it? Did we ask anybody else? Do we know what the majority of our user base thinks about it?
CU -- Stefan Hundhammer
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