On Sat Dec 8 11:27:32 EST 2012, [email protected] wrote: > > In these days of 3 Gbyte memory requirements for browsers, and 1 Gbyte > > gnome-panels, should we still insist on quotefmtinstall to ensure %q? > > I'm with you, but it's also a slippery slope... > > I do wish we could spend effort in the opposite direction, myself. > Maybe it could be an optional patch, for those of us who get bitten > and have more important things in life than remembering that 8c is not > 8g :-)
some points. 0. the essence of charles' point is that persistent memory is cheep, and little fiddly bits are expensive, from a developer's point of view. and by cheep, we're talking silly cheep. 1kb of disk costs 100 nanodollars. it's the order of magnitude that's important here, a small integer factor won't make disks expensive. 1. it can't be optional. this is the sort of thing that got latter-day unix in so much trouble. if you want your program to work everywhere (as most people do) you have to program for the least common denominator, so every program will need quotefmtinstall(). so there will be a net savings of zero. and since the problem will now appear on some systems, it will probablly be harder to remember that you've forgotten to quotefmtinstall. 2. if you want to save overall storage, the print library should ditch standard support for the rune*print() functions. only 4 programs use them. - erik
