Re: [CTTE #770789] IEC units in df output

[Adam Borowski]

On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 10:38:33AM -0800, Don Armstrong wrote:
  RESOLUTION 
 
 In 770789, the Technical Committee was asked to override the decision
 of upstream and the maintainer of df to not include i in the units
 output when asked for IEC output (2^10).
 
 The CTTE declines to override the decision of the maintainer and
 upstream.
 
  END OF RESOLUTION 

Thank you guys!  The -ebi- plague is horrible and needs to be fought!
You could have responded using some of Ted Ts'o arguments and quotations
from #757831.

Or, as in a discussion I once had with an old geezer (now retired) who
couldn't believe someone could come up with an unit as intuitive as MiB:
MiB means million bytes as opposed to MB at 1048576, right?


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Re: [CTTE #770789] IEC units in df output

[Steve Langasek]

On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 09:57:34PM +0100, Adam Borowski wrote:
 On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 10:38:33AM -0800, Don Armstrong wrote:
   RESOLUTION 

  In 770789, the Technical Committee was asked to override the decision
  of upstream and the maintainer of df to not include i in the units
  output when asked for IEC output (2^10).

  The CTTE declines to override the decision of the maintainer and
  upstream.

   END OF RESOLUTION 

 Thank you guys!  The -ebi- plague is horrible and needs to be fought!
 You could have responded using some of Ted Ts'o arguments and quotations
 from #757831.

This is not a statement by the TC about the appropriateness of these prefix
conventions, one way or the other.  It is only a statement that the TC is
not overriding the maintainer (and upstream) regarding this decision.  I
don't think it's appropriate for the maintainer of the Debian package to
diverge from upstream on something like this; and furthermore I don't think
it's reasonable for the TC to overrule the maintainer's decision to follow
upstream.  That doesn't mean I think the current behavior is /correct/, only
that I don't think a TC override is an appropriate method of getting this
behavior changed.

If this is going to be changed, it should be done by getting consensus
upstream about how to change the behavior - not by making such a core tool
as df behave inconsistently between Debian and other distributions.

While my gut reaction to the IEC convention when I first became aware of it
was one of distaste, traditional behavior *is* ambiguous, and this ambiguity
(including behavior that differs between applications) is confusing.  Ubuntu
ratified a units policy several years ago that I believe strikes the right
balance:

  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnitsPolicy

For a tool such as df, there would be some benefit to being consistent with
this policy, by showing Ki/Mi/Gi instead of K/M/G in the output where
suitable.  But there is also a cost to the extra space used up in the line
by changing from a one-character suffix to a two-character suffix in each of
the columns.  I think it's appropriate for the Debian maintainer and the
coreutils upstream to do their own analysis of the cost/benefit tradeoff
here, without the TC presuming to meddle.

-- 
Steve Langasek   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/
slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org


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