when doing something surprising, say so

[Matthew D. Fuller]

On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 10:27:11AM +1000 I heard the voice of
Martin Pool, and lo! it spake thus:
> 
> In the case of 407834 it's not unexpected that doing on-the-fly
> translation of formats would be more work than just copying across
> the compressed records, but it may be unobvious to the user that
> this is occurring.  So I'd say we should give a warning here.

Even leaving performance to the side, and considering strictly UI
factors, it could be a net positive to yack about it any time we're
crossing formats.  There are times when that's a desirable
configuration (so we should have the ability to selectively disable
it), but most of the time, performance or no, it's a sign that
somebody's falling behind the rest of $PROJECT, and should be told
about it.


-- 
Matthew Fuller     (MF4839)   |  fullermd at over-yonder.net
Systems/Network Administrator |  http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/
           On the Internet, nobody can hear you scream.