On 03/30/2014 05:23, Rich Freeman wrote: > On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 4:33 AM, Michał Górny wrote: >> >> 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 > > To think that counting is the one situation where it is actually > possible to have perfect precision, and we still manage to mess up the > units... > > I'm a bit torn on this. I'm an American, so I am supposed to do > something ambiguous and arbitrary (can we count bytes in baker's > dozens?). I'm also a Chemist, and never met an SI unit I didn't like. > > We do need to keep in mind that the laws of physics dictate that > boolean states can only be combined in groups of 8. That's a shame, > because kibibits just rolls off the tongue and helps promote healthy > fur. > > Now I need to get back to sleep because I have a 97.7 kibimeter drive > tomorrow... I'm on the side of using the old prefixes. I just never groked the base-10 forms. Since Gentoo is all about choice, why not make it configurable? Maybe a USE flag or some other switch in make.conf that can be read by Portage to let you choose if you want natural computer size presentations (old prefix) or the human-friendly ones (new prefixes). We've obviously got the code for both forms in the referenced eclass, so just wrap it in a conditional based on the chosen switch. That laves the debate up to which value is the default. That said, I assume the six-fingered man might have an entirely different opinion on this matter. -- Joshua Kinard Gentoo/MIPS kumba@gentoo.org 4096R/D25D95E3 2011-03-28 "The past tempts us, the present confuses us, the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast, terrible in-between." --Emperor Turhan, Centauri Republic