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

From: Antoine Pelisse <apelisse@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 5, 2013, 20:31 UTC
Message-ID: <CALWbr2wgJmY86Fic-eE9AbtP=HMPddTO=LDp5RGYmt6_kFawpg@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <7vvc82jm77.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>

Should we use that opportunity to implement an option like -h (for humanize) similar to what ls(1), df(1), du(1) does ? Of course "-h" is already used for help, so we could use -H or any other sensible choice. It can become tough to read the size when it gets big enough.

On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 6:27 PM, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Show 42 quoted lines

> 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".
> --
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