Re: Configure.help editorial policy

Kai Henningsen
2001-12-27T14:21:05Z

landley@trommello.org (Rob Landley) wrote on 23.12.01 in <20011223174227.NCJM25224.femail12.sdc1.sfba.home.com@there>:

> But the binary or decimal nature of the measurement has always been
> application specific up until now, and I'm curious why that's suddenly not
> good enough anymore.

Would you want to live in a world where 1 litre milk was either more or
less than 1 litre water?

Why, then, do you think it was *ever* "good enough"?

I certainly never thought that 1 GB disk being a different number of
usable bits than 1 GB RAM was ever "good enough". *I* considered that to
be plain old fraud.

> The switch appears to be based on the assumption that conformance to a
> standard issued by a bureaucratic body is arbitrarily better than
> established practice. And yet that's not what it does, because it refuses
> to use the long form...

"Established practice" is that these prefixes are decimal. It has been
established practice before the first electronic computer was even built.

> The patch is a can of worms, and abandoning the current domain-based
> defaults (ram is binary, network is decimal, disk needs to pick one) is not
> something I see as an improvement. But you're the maintainer...

I see it as an unequivocal improvement, even though I don't like the
actual choice of prefix. But then, I never liked "Exa" or "Peta" either
...

MfG Kai