On Jun 14, 2006, at 4:09 AM, Mislav Marohnić wrote:
On 6/14/06, Jamie Quint <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I think the alias idea is a good one. I have submitted a patch that
does exactly that.
http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/5387
Jamie,
Your patch has one fundamental flaw. Purists who would want to use
kibibyte etc. to display sizes measured in base 2 units would sure
be against kilobyte etc. measuring in base 2 units too. In other
words, this is only half of the solution, and we are looking for a
complete one.
James: about drop-kicking the principle of least surprise - in my
opinion, programmers who would be surprised to find out 'kilo'
means 1000 are the same who don't exactly care about the precision.
So I don't think they are even going to notice.
About the potential breakage: in my patch, there is a method
(ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Numeric::Bytes.legacy_base) which
makes good ol' methods measure in base 2 units again. Folk who
don't want to roll with this change would put that in
environment.rb, preventing breakage.
About writing a plugin for this: sure I'm going to make a plugin
out of my patch; I just need to set up a repository for this. But I
never believed this was just some odd, wacky practice intented for
rare people -- I believe this should be Rails core to raise
awareness in current and (especially) next generations. Today,
precision matters; Strongspace, some bittorent clients and
trackers, and others all demonstrate this.
Note that Strongspace and bittorent *display* the number as KiB, etc.
You can still do that in Rails--the Numeric#kilobyte method is for
programmers to call--it's up to you to tell the user what the units
are. Thus, there is nothing preventing you from saying, in a view:
<%= size.kilobytes %> KiB
But that's not the issue that started all of this. What is under
discussion right now is not displaying the "proper" units to the
user, it is making a helper with with the "proper" name available to
the developer.
That said, the half-solution is sufficient. Is it necessary? I still
have my doubts. For now, a plugin is the way to go. If it gains wide
enough adoption, we can certainly consider adding to core.
- Jamis_______________________________________________
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