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 Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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