Devel update

[Nils Kassube]

Christopher Chan wrote without attribution:
> > Those were the substantive issues for this month.  Waaaay too much
> > time was spent explaining to a single user why it really _is_ a
> > good idea for apps to report byte counts in either powers of 10
> > (KB, MB, GB, TB) or powers of 2 (KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB) and that
> > _meaning_ powers of 2 but _writing_ KB, etc, was not a good idea. 
> > And then there was the rant about Mono being EVIL.
>
> Bah. More like there is general ignorance about IEC units (kibibyte,
> mebibyte, gibibytes, tebibytes aka KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB) and that there
> is a wish to return to the original meaning of SI prefixes just like
> what the hard disk and network equipment manufacturers have done.

Network equipment was _always_ using SI units so they didn't need to 
return. I'm not so sure about disk manufacturers but I don't think I 
have ever seen disks advertised as e.g. 10MB meaning 10 * 2^20 bytes.

> Hands up those who want Ubuntu to report 1000 multiples of bytes as
> KB, MB, GB, TB while other operating systems (including other Linux
> distros) are still using the erroneous convention of reporting 1024
> multiples of bytes as KB, MB, GB, TB and not Kib, MiB, GiB, TiB.

/me raises hand. But _please_ don't introduce another nonsense unit like 
KB - it is _kB_ with lower case k.

> Hands up those who want Ubuntu to wait till there is an operating
> system standard like POSIX that declares convention dead and
> standards are in vogue.

Someone has to make the first move. And Linux is already moving in the 
right direction, the kernel uses binary prefixes for many years. Good 
luck if you want to make all (or even only all Unix-like) operating 
systems switch from bad habits to standards compliance. I'm not sure if 
POSIX is relevant for the desktop at all. It may be important for the 
command line to keep existing scripts working.

But your poll isn't really useful because you didn't ask the important 
question: Should desktop applications display file size in decimal or 
binary prefixes, i.e. should the application show "1013 MiB" or should 
it rather show "1062 MB"?


Nils