In this Ubuntu cycle, I work on getting the units policy implemented. For this I wrote a library called libkibi. Here are some screen shots how nautilus looks like with libkibi. Some changes are highlighted in red.
The file properties will show the file size in base10 and base2:
PS: I failed to launch nautilus in English. Therefore the screen shots are in German.
PS²: You can grab the modified nautilus package for Ubuntu 10.10 (maverick) from my experimental PPA (at your own risk!).
Why does libkibi still use the name “byteprefix” for its configuration file and environment variable?
It uses byteprefix, because this configuration should be independent from the library. I plan to create a freedesktop.org specification for this configuration.
I think your work is really important. Besides what some people say, we can’t continue using the wrong prefixes, especially as storage capacities and file sizes increase and the difference gets even bigger.
So, my question is: Is there any plan to adopt this also for Debian, not only for Ubuntu?
The libkibi package will be available in Debian. I’ll try to get my patches upstream. So it’s up to the package maintainers to build their package against libkibi. Let’s see how far we get in wheezy.
Why kB (with a lower-case ‘k’) instead of KB? I thought all the larger prefixes were upper-case.
(searching around, it seems I was wrong–and that ‘de’ is used for Deca- instead of D, which is weird…)
Full list of SI prefixes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_prefix
Thanks, I had visited that page, but hadn’t read the whole thing. The only obvious reason I could find for a lower-case ‘k’ is that the upper-case ‘K’ was already being used for ‘KB’, which is usually used to refer to kilobytes. That makes sense, I guess, except you shouldn’t use an upper-case ‘B’ to refer to bits anyway (according to the same page):
“The National Institute of Standards and Technology in the United States has suggested the use of bit for bits and B for bytes.”
So, instead of kB, you should probably use kbit (or something like that, but I didn’t find that in the pdf they referenced)
It’s also said that ‘K’ is the symbol for Kelvin, which should be fine (I think), since it shouldn’t prefix anything anyway…but I guess it’s good to prevent conflicts whenever possible.
Oh, and it’s ‘da’, not ‘de’ for deca; a combination of bad memory and not great vision does that to me sometimes.
Err, you aren’t referring to bits, so you can and probably should ignore the last two thirds of my previous comment. XD
Sorry about that.
Strange, I thought everything was already there in Nautilus. Since something like two years I see sizes indicated in Kio, Mio and Gio (in French, the word octet is used instead of byte), both in the file list view and the file properties dialog.
In addition, in your first screenshot I do not see any binary prefix, on the contrary.
So I do not understand what you are working on. Does Nautilus not already support binary prefixes?
I think this library approach is too difficult. Simply use Kib / Mib suffixes where Kb / Mb has been traditionally misused and use Kb / Mb where they are correct. Giving users options for changing between Mb and Mib is probably just going to confuse people.
[...] Comments « Nautilus with libkibi [...]
Don’t care about ubutnut crap on planet Debian
My parents, family and friends understand MB’s and GB’s. This won’t mean much to them. Or me. Does it have a dconf-scheme to disable it?
You can configure libkibi by setting the format in /etc/byteprefix or XDG_CONFIG_HOME/byteprefix. More details in the man page of byteprefix.
Looks cool. thx