Re: [Nmh-workers] new marker format broke test suite

[Paul Fox]

ralph wrote:
 > Hi Paul,
 > 
 > > it's clearly (to me, at least) not too late to change "units" to
 > > "kilo".  kibi can be added separately.
 > 
 > Ken said the code used base 2, >> 10, so the shipped files using the new
 > `units' should switch to kibi?  Or perhaps there aren't any?  (I thought
 > the functions were being added so marker lines could better represent
 > the content so they were being used there.)

summary:

currently (1.6 and previous) the part marker comes from mhlist's
list_content().  that code computes the size using ">> 10", and prints
K/M/G/T.  it avoids dealing with fractions by printing small numbers
of megabytes as large numbers of kilobytes, e.g.. "1089K".

when i made the marker controllable, at first the size got dropped
altogether (since part size wasn't available from mh-format), and then
when i realized that was a bit of a UI regression, it got added back
using %(units), which does "/ 1000", and prints K/M/G/T.  the default
mhshow.marker then adds a 'B', resulting in KB/MB/GB/TB.  ken and i had
agreed that it was okay to change the format somewhat (we were
specifically discussing the "1089K" thing at the time), and since i
was only implementing one %(units) function, decimal seemed like a
better choice than binary.  %(units) prints at most one digit after a
decimal point for fractional values.

i'm currently planning on renaming %(units) to %(kilo), and then adding
a new %(kibi), which will print Ki/Mi/Gi/Ti.

i don't particularly care whether %(kilo) or %(kibi) is used in the
default marker.  if left to me, i'll choose %(kilo).

paul
=----------------------
 paul fox, address@hidden (arlington, ma, where it's 47.3 degrees)