Joey Hess wrote:
I prefer not to use these new prefixes, because the old ones only became confused due to the efforts of drive manufacturers. Who are perfectly capable (and equally financially motivated) of pulling the same trick with the new units, standards body or no. Also, the "ib" prefixes sound stupid. Furthermore, the "KiB" abbreviation wastes a lot more screen space than "K", while actually converying no additional useful information. Many programs use every available character in a nominal 80 column screen and would have to drop information, precision, or significantly change their display to use the "KiB" unit.
Ok, "sounds stupid" and "may not fit on 80 column" screen.I agree with the "sounds stupid" part, although I don't belive this is a valid argument. What I don't believe is your 80 colums argument. Could you please name a few of the *many* programs which would have to drop information, precision, or significantly change their display to use the "KiB" unit?
On the other hand, we have the chance to avoid user confusion and follow a standard that (according to the wikipedia article) many already adopted, like the GNU core utils, the linux kernel, ifconfig, launchpad and gparted and many standards bodies and technical organizations like IEEE, CIPM, NIST, and SAE.
Debian has approximately as small of a chance standarising this throughout the distribution as we do standadising the spelling of "colo[u]r" or "standardi[sz]e" throughout the distribution.
One is correct American- and the other correct British English spelling. I don't see the problem. I think there is already a l10n for package descriptions project going on to solve this problem, so we don't have to standardi[sz]e one of them ;)
Cheers, Bastian -- Bastian Venthur http://venthur.de Debian Developer venthur at debian org