[Toybox] [PATCH] top: don't report GiB sizes in KiB.

[Rob Landley]

On 9/6/20 6:45 AM, Jarno Mäkipää wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 6, 2020 at 12:34 PM Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
>> Elliott says there's a maximum limit on the number of digits users are willing
>> to parse, and you're saying it's better to just have large blank gaps between
>> the numbers than to use that space for anything, AND that the cap on the maximum
>> number of digits is insurmountable rather than using separators like people have
>> been doing for hundreds of years to cope with long numbers in "human readable"
>> output?
>>
>> It's certainly a point of view.
> 
> Groups of 3 are indeed easier for eye. I would suggest using something
> more sensible like spaces.

Which is not what any country uses by default and thus makes everyone equally do
a double take? Egalitarian badness?

Hardwiring it to the esperanto of formats is certainly a suggestion.

> SI system uses spaces as thousands separator, comma and period both
> being valid decimal separator.
> 123 456.789 or 123 456,789

Ok, I'll bite: which countries teach SI to their kids in primary school?

>> Bravo. And bionic's libc/bionic/locale.gratuitouslycppbutactuallyc says:
>>
>>   // We only support two locales, the "C" locale (also known as "POSIX"),
>>   // and the "C.UTF-8" locale (also known as "en_US.UTF-8").
>>
>> So they don't support it either.
> 
> C.UTF-8 and en_US.UTF-8 are not same.

I cut and pasted that out of the bionic source.

>> However, if the commas go, why doesn't the period in human_readable() go? I
>> don't see how they're conceptually different?

I'm waiting for an opinion from Elliott, which might be a "meh?" because it's
not exactly his area either.

A proper fix would be a localeconv() in libc that DOESN'T return constant stub
info, which is out of scope for toybox. (And is as much an ADB thing as a bionic
thing since android seems to be using adb instead of ssh, so that would have to
marshall the locale environment variables from the host into the target. But I
often "wait for somebody to complain", you complained, and therefore I want to
fix it PROPERLY.)

In the meantime, I can add a call to localeconv() that would use "," if that
returns "" which means right now it would be a NOP but then it's not my fault
it's getting it wrong. And I can test against glibc which does have an
overengineered version of this in it. Way back when uClibc had a much compressed
format for the localeconv data, but didn't have a database of countries and thus
copied its data from glibc, which it couldn't distribute for licensing reasons:

  https://lists.uclibc.org/pipermail/uclibc/2015-June/049000.html

Rob

P.S. I ranted about this sort of aesthetic issue being something the open source
development model can't deal with 10 years ago, almost to the day:

  https://landley.net/notes-2010.html#13-08-2010

And included it in my 2013 talk:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0#t=11m30s