Hi Rob, On 2/22/23 23:18, Rob Landley wrote:
16LL on 32 bit systems, but from an "explain what the number is" perspective it neatly avoids needing to specify a base or units. :)
Right.
What's "fetch"?A pop culture reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pubd-spHN-0
:p
(Part of the reason is kibybyte/mebibyte/gibibyte are minor tongue twisters, they're physically harder to say, so nobody does.)I rarely talk about this stuff; more often, I write about it. When I write, the shorthand MiB is nice (I never write mebibyte).I always read that TLA as "Men in Black", but I know what you mean.
$ wtf is TLA TLA: three letter acronym true love always :)
I say "binary megabytes"
That's valid, I think. And if it's not, everyone would understand. > the same way I say "degrees celsius".
The GNU coding standards for writing C programs are horrible. But they have very nice things in their standards. Their standardization of Makefile targets and variables is quite nice, and I try to follow it closely.Hence cmake and ninja and so on.
Uhh, no, thanks!
(Still there in Documentation/process/coding-style.rst.) GNU has nothing to do with Linux, and never did. Stallman has a history of taking credit for other people's work:I never said so. GNU is a set of userspace programs, Linux is a kernel, and GNU/Linux is the entire OS (or more precisely a relatively important part of it).A busybox system isn't gnu, which means alpine linux isn't. Android using toybox with a "no GPL in userspace policy" and built with llvm to avoid even the FSF's compiler isn't gnu. So Linux on phones, and one of the standard docker distros, actively _avoid_ using gnu. (These days, "systemd/linux" is probably at least as accurate as "gnu/linux".
Yeah, any of them is fine IMO. I write from a GNU/Linux distro, but I admit that I should have maybe said "most programs in Unix-like systems these days use IEC prefixes".
I type that from devuan...)
Me too :)
I CCed GNU coreutils so that they feel alluded and maybe improve their utils :)I'm still on that mailing list until they merge cut -DF.
What would that do?
You've taken over from Michael Kerrisk then? I should inform https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2022/11/30/2#:~:text=biggest%20problem and friends...
I guess many should already know. But yes, feel free to inform.
Since 2020, I comaintained the project with Michael, and now I'm the only maintainer of the project. To be more precise, let's quote the README: Maintainers Alejandro Colomar <alx@xxxxxxxxxx> <http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/> 2020 - present (5.09 - HEAD) Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@xxxxxxxxx> <https://man7.org/> 2004 - 2021 (2.00 - 5.13) Andries Brouwer <aeb@xxxxxx> <https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb> 1995 - 2004 (1.6 - 1.70) Rik Faith <https://www.cs.unc.edu/~faith/> 1993 - 1995 (1.0 - 1.5)Good to know. (I just randomly stopped getting the emailed updates...) Ah, there you are on https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/maintaining.html
Yep :)
Or you can say Kelvin ;)And when the weather reports start giving temperatures in kelvin... they would still say "degrees", wouldn't they? It's 267 degrees in Minneapolis today...
To be pedantic, and quoting the SI brochure v9: "* The unit name “degree kelvin” was changed to “kelvin” in 1967 by the 13th CGPM (Resolution 3, see p. 169)." So you should say kelvins, not degrees kelvin. <https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/41483022/SI-Brochure-9-EN.pdf/2d2b50bf-f2b4-9661-f402-5f9d66e4b507?version=1.11&t=1671101192839&download=true#%5B%7B%22num%22%3A372%2C%22gen%22%3A0%7D%2C%7B%22name%22%3A%22Fit%22%7D%5D> Page 163 (49 in the PDF).
Gigabytes can be in base 10 or base 2. They're still gigabytes.In colloquial texts, or more appropriately in colloquial talking, degrees (without specifying), tons (same), or "megs", are fine, but for a manual, where we want precision (especially since we do mix decimal and binary multipliers often), I would strongly avoid misusing terms.*shrug* If you're maintainer, it's your call. I've said my piece."They'll google it" is the modern version of "they'll read the documentation". They will not, you're just delegating blame.I can't imagine someone reading MiB in a manual page and not searching what that means (unless the reader doesn't care about that specific value).It's _possible_ the man page maintainer is not, in isolation, a fully rounded representative sample on this issue?
It's possible, but I have my doubts in this case.By chance, I was having a look at a computer that had RedHat Openshift open, and the system resources usage view used IEC multipliers (men in black units).
`free -h` also uses them. The top(1) manual page also uses "kibibytes" and other such expanded words.
Rob P.S. Maybe this is a generational thing? Are the kids saying "kibibyte" in high school these days?I don't think so. Teachers usually don't know these prefixes either, I guess.Do you expect to change global language usage patterns or just make the man pages less relevant to their intended audience?
Honestly, I expect the former. Not single-handedly, but rather I feel supported by a lot of (very common) software out there. I understand it's not everywhere, but also it's not as if it didn't exist prior to me.
As for the Linux man-pages, at least a few already use these (prior to me, I believe, since I don't remember changing that):
$ grep -rl -e KiB -e MiB -e GiB man*/ man2/ioctl_getfsmap.2 man2/process_vm_readv.2 man2/add_key.2 man2/execve.2 man2/getrlimit.2 man2/ioctl_fideduperange.2 man2/kexec_load.2 man2/alloc_hugepages.2 man3/btree.3 man4/fd.4 man4/loop.4 man5/proc.5 man7/pipe.7 man7/keyrings.7 man7/units.7 $ grep -rn kibiman5/tmpfs.5:60:suffix for Ki, Mi, Gi (binary kilo (kibi), binary mega (mebi), and binary giga
man2/msgctl.2:216: int msgpool; /* Size in kibibytes of buffer pool man7/units.7:58:Ki kibi 2^10 = 1024 man7/units.7:104:the MB are megabytes and the KiB are kibibytes.
They'll have to remove the second space from my cold dead fingers.That's exactly how the change will happen, yes. This was published 9 years ago: https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/two-spaces-after-period/
It's funny, I'm still in my twenties. :p
All those style guides are plain wrong. I've read their rationales, and they make no sense at all. Using one space is discarding information, and that is bad.Blame Tim Berners-Lee. The cultural shift started when HTML rendered all runs of whitespace as a single space back in 1991. People write what they read.
Actually, it comes from much earlier than that. Have a look at <https://web.archive.org/web/20171107164742/http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324>The real reason seems to be that single spaces lowered the quality of required editors, and thus prices. It's all about the money.
I guess the "problems" are the consistency thing referred in the second sentence... Well, it's not inconsistency, it's just that different things are different. I don't like oranges and tomatoes because they're inconsistent; one fruit is red and the other is orange... Nonsense.I got an english minor in college, and one of the things it drilled into me is if it's correct and nobody does it, it's not correct.
I do agree with that. The thing here is that I disagree about it not being used. If you look at many commonly-used programs, you'll see it all over the place: top(1), free(1), fdisk(1), ...
English! It's a mess. We jettisoned the second person singular because british nobility started copying the queen (who spoke for the nation, thus always in the "we are not amused" plural) and it moved downhill until eventually addressing someone else as thou was fighting words because it meant you considered the person you were addressing your social inferior (yes the Amish got physically attacked for this, it's part of the reason they moved). This is also one of those subtleties in shakespeare, the way he uses "thou" as an insult, because the transition was ongoing in his time:
Ahhh, thou is 2nd singular! That explains many things :). I learnt something new today.
https://drmarkwomack.com/engl-3306/handouts/shakespeares-language/thou-and-you-in-shakespeare/
But do I expect kibibytes to take off? Not really, no. Could be wrong, but...
I hope you're wrong in this one. ;)
Rob
Cheers, Alex -- <http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/> GPG key fingerprint: A9348594CE31283A826FBDD8D57633D441E25BB5
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