Re: [gentoo-project] Call for agenda items - Council meeting 2014-04-08

["Michał Górny" <mgorny@gentoo.org>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1849 bytes --]

Dnia 2014-03-27, o godz. 09:40:47
"Anthony G. Basile" <blueness@gentoo.org> napisał(a):

> The council will be meeing on April 8, 2014 at 1900 UTC.  Please bring 
> forward any agenda items you would like discussed.

Before we get into another revert war from patrick, I'd like to raise
the following item:

- use of ISO/IEC binary prefixes vs ambiguous 'mega' prefixes

Quick explanation:

ISO/IEC prefixes [1,2]: KiB (kibibyte), MiB (mebi-), GiB (gibi-)
  -- unambiguously 2^10, 2^20, 2^30

'old' prefixes: kB (kilobyte), MB (mega-), GB (giga-)
  -- can mean 10^3 or 2^10 etc. depending on author's intention
  -- SI people tend to use 10^N for consistency with other units

Major FLOSS projects have already started using binary prefixes:
the Linux kernel and GNU coreutils (e.g. df). They are used in e.g.
pacman as well, and I've submitted patches for portage already.

2.5yr ago scarabeus had updated check-reqs.eclass to use binary
prefixes [3] after a mailing list discussion. 1.5yr ago patrick changed
units back [4] without any discussion. Yesterday ulm (not knowing of
earlier revert) noticed the wrong names and fixed them again [5]. Today
patrick threatened already that he's going to revert the change.

Therefore, I'd like to have this discussed and voted through by Council
so that we could have a single front rather than a single developer
reverting changes randomly.

[1]:http://www.iec.ch/si/binary.htm
[2]:http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html
[3]:http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/eclass/check-reqs.eclass?r1=1.8&r2=1.9
[4]:http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/eclass/check-reqs.eclass?r1=1.12&r2=1.13
[5]:http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/eclass/check-reqs.eclass?r1=1.13&r2=1.14

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny

[-- Attachment #2: signature.asc --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 966 bytes --]