On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 06:09:49PM -0700, Kevin J. McCarthy wrote: > Yes, Olaf Hering submitted a patch in 1.10, zeroing out the directory size > for the reason you site below: > > > However the size of a directory is very likely not what you think it is, > > and is not particularly useful to you. On Unix systems, at least for > > most file systems, the size of a directory is the space occupied by the > > blocks needed to hold the internal representation of the listing of the > > directory... NOT the size of the contents of the directory. > > I don't feel strongly one way or another, but the listing does look a bit > cleaner with the (useless) sizes zeroed out. Feel free to bring it up on > mutt-dev if you feel it should be changed back.
I see... Well, I would say I don't really get the point or the motivation for displaying 0K instead of the actual value... If users thought to put it in their folder format, presumably they actually cared about that info, and now they can't have it... I don't see that this change saves anything either--you still have to stat() the directory to get the other info (like access times) so you already will have the info anyway. You could remove %s from folder_format, but I s'pose people still want it for the sizes of files. Or, perhaps a new format specifier like %S (I'm not bothering to check if that's available for folder_format) which displays the size for files, but displays nothing for directories... But honestly, if you're already displaying sizes for files, it seems to me that not displaying directory sizes will just look weird. No one noticed for over 2 years (that I recall hearing about anyway), so I'm not sure that it matters in practice, but from a purely philosophical standpoint, do I feel strongly about actively choosing to display information that's factually wrong, especially when the only upside (as far as I can see) is a completely subjective cosmetic improvement. If I'd noticed, I certainly would have argued against it. But, I didn't... =8^) -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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