kB and KiB, shouldn't we standardize the units?

[kanarus]

In crates.io, kB is used to specify the size of package :

But cargo publish uses KiB :

This inconsistency may be strange for crate developers. Shouldn't we standardize them?

---

Then, in my opinion, changing crates.io to use KiB is better than the opposite. Because git push, almost all crate developers will do before cargo publish, uses KiB/s, not kB/s :

So I think it's a good idea in terms of consistency for crate developers. What are your thoughts on this?

[Andrew15-5]

My humble rant:

Yes! I strongly believe in binary prefixes because everything is coded in binary! I hate this inconsistency between SI and binary prefixes across not only programs, but OSes too! It's great when Megabytes and Mebibytes are indeed show different number of bytes, but it's all for nothing when user thinks that Megabytes are basically Mebibytes (every teacher/professor these days still uses SI prefixes even in the context of binary prefixes).

How many people are actually counting 8 bits times 1000 times 1000? Maybe only if you want to sell a 2TB HDD (where 2TB maybe are indeed 2 TB, but definitely not 2 TiB). And then everyone gets frustrated that they got about 1.82 TiB (numfmt 2T --from=auto --to=iec-i --format=%.2f).

The configuration seems very complicated as I don't use JS (only TS), never used ember etc. But the easiest solution is to change this line:

crates.io/app/helpers/pretty-bytes.js

Line 5 in b96ed5c

export default helper(([bytes], options) => prettyBytes(bytes, options));

to:

export default helper(([bytes], options) => prettyBytes(bytes, {...options, binary: true}));

The owner of the pretty-bytes package (which is how the bytes are converted on crates.io) "feels" the other way.

sindresorhus/pretty-bytes#7 (comment):

No. It's intentionally option-less. I feel base-10 is the right way to display sizes for humans.

You're of course free to use any of the other file size prettifiers if you disagree :)

And after that, the package somehow got an option to use binary prefixes instead. Which means that crates.io doesn't have to look for "other file size prettifiers".

TL;DR: to counter the legacy of confusing SI prefixes in binary world, we must switch digital size measuring (for files, archives, "crates") to binary prefixes everywhere. Thankfully, a bunch of FOSS software already uses them and that is great.

[kanarus]

Thank you for your response and detailed research! Yes, that looks correct. I'll go ahead and create a pull request...

[kanarus]

Done!

• Switch to binary prefixes #7218

waiting a review...