Re: [PATCH v2] count-objects: output "KiB" instead of "kilobytes"

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Apr 4, 2013, 16:27 UTC
Message-ID: <7vvc82jm77.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <CADyhzG3HJhrXJAoTfyHUsg=8ZmUUwUgrNfUiLHF0Ws=gSERAqw@mail.gmail.com>

Mihai Capotă <mihai@mihaic.ro> writes:

> The git manual contains an explicit warning about the output of a
> porcelain command changing: "The interface to Porcelain commands on
> the other hand are subject to change in order to improve the end user
> experience."

Yeah, I know that, as I wrote it ;-)

Aside from count-object being not exactly a Porcelain, the statement does not give us a blank check to make random changes as we see fit. There needs to be a clear improvement.

I am just having a hard time weighing the benefit of using more accurate kibibytes over kilobytes and the possible downside of breaking other peoples' tools.

Perhaps it would be alright if the change was accompanied by a warning in the Release Notes to say something like:

        If you have scripts that decide when to run "git repack" by
	parsing the output from "git count-objects", this release
	may break them.  Sorry about that.  One of the scripts
	shipped by git-core itself also had to be adjusted.  The
	command reports the total diskspace used to store loose
	objects in kibibytes, but it was labelled as "kilobytes".
	The number now is shown with "KiB", e.g. "6750 objects,
	50928 KiB".

	You may want to consider updating such scripts to always
	call "git gc --auto" to let it decide when to repack for
	you.

Also, I suspect that for the purpose of this exact output field, nobody cares the difference between kibibytes and kilobytes. Depending on the system, we add up either st.st_blocks or st.st_size and the result is not that exact as "how much diskspace is consumed".