Dear maintainer,

when installing Debian, it's painful to size the partitions.  I want
them to be aligned with certain boundaries, and want them to have very
specific sizes (usually, multiples of 1 GiB), but the default
partitioning program doesn't allow that.  fdisk or gdisk provide a
much better way of specifying such things by allowing one to specify
initial sector and size in several formats.  Please add such semantics
to the default program, or include fdisk and gdisk in the installer.

I usually format disks from a live system with those tools, and later
run the installer on the formatted disk, because I hate how it formats
disks.

Thanks,

Alex

Hi Stefan,

We might do that.  So far, I prefer having the patches change
everything, and then we can later discuss about discarding part of them.
prefixes are more common.  In fact, I'd say most GNU/Linux commands
respect them (an important exception being GNU coreutils (for example
ls(1)).  But many programs use prefixes accurately, such as fdisk(8).

In the Linux man-pages we have units(7), which documents these.  Maybe
that page should be more known.

BTW, that answer is inaccurate (at least today): drive manufacturers
have the distinction pretty clear, and use it precisely (with lawsuits
won thanks to this); they use metric prefixes, because they mean it.
They can sell you 1 TB instead of 1 TiB, and most people won't even
know, but those who know, will know that 1 TB is 1'000'000'000'000 B,
which is what you get.  They have no incentives to sell 1 TiB drives,
because they are visually almost the same, but there's around 9.95% more
bytes, so it's more expensive to produce.  It's not worth it for them.

Well, using MiB prompts readers to use their search engine to learn what
that is (that's how I learnt it the first time; and that's what one does
when reading a book and finding a new word).  I think that shouldn't be
considered an impediment, but an opportunity to learn something new.

Once you know the difference, you appreciate the preciseness.  I hate
when I see some software that uses the metric prefixes for meaning
binary multipliers.  I also hate software that operates on bytes, when
you almost always want binary multipliers but only have metric
multipliers (hey partman, I mean you!).  I reported a bug to the Debian
installer recently because it's very painful to partition a drive from it.

Cheers,

Alex

1<<20 is a megabyte, 1<<30 is a gigabyte, and so on. I've sometimes used
16*(1<<30) for clarity.

Very few people do. Some people have been trying to make "fetch" happen for many
years, but it didn't. (Part of the reason is kibybyte/mebibyte/gibibyte are
minor tongue twisters, they're physically harder to say, so nobody does.)

"First off, I'd suggest printing out a copy of the GNU coding standards,
and NOT read it.  Burn them, it's a great symbolic gesture." - Linus Torvalds

(Still there in Documentation/process/coding-style.rst.)

GNU has nothing to do with Linux, and never did. Stallman has a history of
taking credit for other people's work:

https://functional.cafe/@tfb/109897415359142549

FYI Michael Kerrisk last updated https://github.com/mkerrisk in 2021. It is now
2023. He still posts monthly proof-of-life to
https://twitter.com/mkerrisk/with_replies but hasn't replied to man-pages email
in the past year that I am aware of?

Dunno why. I emailed to ask, but...

Remember when the dictionaries gave in on "literally" meaning "an emphatic form
of figuratively"? What's the "kibybyte" equivalent we all switched to there for
clarity?

We say "metric ton" and "imperial ton". We say "degrees farenheit" and "degrees
celsius". The celsius people didn't come up with a different word for degree,
yet somehow we all survived...

"No, a _bud_ lite..."

"They'll google it" is the modern version of "they'll read the documentation".
They will not, you're just delegating blame.

Rob

P.S. Maybe this is a generational thing? Are the kids saying "kibibyte" in high
school these days? I know that "hacker means computer breakin specialist" is
something a small number of boomers will resist to the death despite a google
news search only pulling up one meaning in general usage. And the "two spaces
after period" thing old hands cling to will only end when they die despite the
chicago manual of style, the AP stylebook, the MLA handbook, and the APA
publication manual all agreeing its' been one space after a period for decades
now. But maybe "kibibyte" is more than a shibboleth to somebody somewhere...

Hi Rob,

That's nice, and for code it might be a good idea (although you have to
be careful, since those are all ints, and 16*(1<<30) is going to
overflow, so you'll need 16L).  For documentation, I don't think I like
it that much.

What's "fetch"?

I rarely talk about this stuff; more often, I write about it.  When I
write, the shorthand MiB is nice (I never write mebibyte).  For talking,
I say "megs" (or rather the Spanish equivalent "megas"), so being
colloquial I can't be blamed, since I didn't really say megabytes.  If I
say the technical term, which is rare, I try to be precise, and say
mebibytes instead of megabytes.

The GNU coding standards for writing C programs are horrible.  But they
have very nice things in their standards.  Their standardization of
Makefile targets and variables is quite nice, and I try to follow it
closely.

I never said so.  GNU is a set of userspace programs, Linux is a kernel,
and GNU/Linux is the entire OS (or more precisely a relatively important
part of it).  Most Linux distros are GNU/Linux distros, since user space
is mostly GNU.  Since I was talking about user-space programs, GNU is
even more appropriate than Linux, although I'm not sure about how much
GNU conforms to these IEC prefixes, which is why I used GNU/Linux as
more generic, referring to the entire set of programs that are included
in such distros (e.g. Debian).

I CCed GNU coreutils so that they feel alluded and maybe improve their
utils :)

That repo is just a mirror of the official repo at
<https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/>,
which I maintain.

He's busy with his own business, and doesn't have time to continue
maintaining the project.  It's a voluntary thing, so it's reasonable to
be able to step out at any time.

Since 2020, I comaintained the project with Michael, and now I'm the
only maintainer of the project.  To be more precise, let's quote the README:

Maintainers
        Alejandro Colomar <alx@kernel.org>
<http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/>
              2020 - present (5.09 - HEAD)
        Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com> <https://man7.org/>
              2004 - 2021 (2.00 - 5.13)
        Andries Brouwer <aeb@cwi.nl> <https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb>
              1995 - 2004    (1.6  - 1.70)
        Rik Faith <https://www.cs.unc.edu/~faith/>
              1993 - 1995    (1.0  - 1.5)

Or you can say Kelvin ;)
In colloquial texts, or more appropriately in colloquial talking,
degrees (without specifying), tons (same), or "megs", are fine, but for
a manual, where we want precision (especially since we do mix decimal
and binary multipliers often), I would strongly avoid misusing terms.

I can't imagine someone reading MiB in a manual page and not searching
what that means (unless the reader doesn't care about that specific value).

I don't think so.  Teachers usually don't know these prefixes either, I
guess.

They'll have to remove the second space from my cold dead fingers.  All
those style guides are plain wrong.  I've read their rationales, and
they make no sense at all.  Using one space is discarding information,
and that is bad.  Let's list their reasons (AFAICS):

-  "It [2 spaces] doesn't look good."
	Subjective, and I disagree.

-  "We don't use monospace anymore, so it's not necessary to recognize
the end of a sentence."
	It may be less necessary, but that doesn't make it bad.
	BTW, does that implicitly recognize that monospace should _always_ use
2 spaces?  Thanks.
	Still with proportional font you can confuse sentence endings with
initials in some cases (depending on the context), so 2 spaces is still
necessary.

-  "2 spaces only increase reading speed for those used to them, and
only marginally (according to studies)."
	Having a very small benefit is better than not having it.
	The fact that one-spacers are slower readers should raise questions.

-  "introducing two spaces after a sentence-ending period—and only after
those periods—causes problems. Absolute consistency is easy to monitor
when double spaces are never allowed, but less easy when some spaces
after periods are double and others single"
	I guess the "problems" are the consistency thing referred in the second
sentence...  Well, it's not inconsistency, it's just that different
things are different.  I don't like oranges and tomatoes because they're
inconsistent; one fruit is red and the other is orange...  Nonsense.

-  "Old English used 3-em space after period, but old Spanish or French
didn't, in fact they often used 0 spaces after punctuation".
	So what?  Were they more readable thanks to that?  No.
	I've had to read old Spanish, and it's pretty painful.
	In fact, 3-em after period old English is quite readable.

-  "2-spacers are just imitating previous writers; they don't know what
they're doing".
	Imitating wise old customs without knowing the rationale is not bad per
se.  Deviating from them without a rationale is even worse.

...

Cheers,

Alex

16LL on 32 bit systems, but from an "explain what the number is" perspective it
neatly avoids needing to specify a base or units. :)


I always read that TLA as "Men in Black", but I know what you mean.

I say "binary megabytes" the same way I say "degrees celsius".

Hence cmake and ninja and so on.

A busybox system isn't gnu, which means alpine linux isn't. Android using toybox
with a "no GPL in userspace policy" and built with llvm to avoid even the FSF's
compiler isn't gnu. So Linux on phones, and one of the standard docker distros,
actively _avoid_ using gnu. (These days, "systemd/linux" is probably at least as
accurate as "gnu/linux". I type that from devuan...)
the James Gosling interview video from last time). Here's the glibc maintainer
accusing stallman of a "hostile takeover of glibc development" 20 years ago:

https://sourceware.org/legacy-ml/libc-announce/2001/msg00000.html#:~:text=And%20now

There were similar political shenanigans to bring EGCS back under FSF control
back in the day (resulting in bad blood at the time), which is why projects like
LLVM carefully avoid having any FSF contamination in them.

When I was researching for a computer history book back in 2001 (ala
https://landley.net/history/mirror) I drove to Boston and interviewed Stallman
at MIT. He claimed credit for BSD having defended itself from AT&T's lawsuits,
which is not something anybody who was actually involved wrote in any of their
histories:

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/open-sources/1565925823/ch04.html

Free software was the NORM before 1983. 1970s computer magazines had BASIC
source code listings in the back, the CP/M users group northwest started its
public domain library in 1981 (ala
https://landley.net/history/mirror/cpm/cpmug.html), I learned C to participate
in the WWIV modding community (we didn't even have "patch", we had english
descriptions of what to do (really! https://landley.net/history/wwiv/ ). Project
Gutenberg was founded in 1971. The Hercules emultor runs that last public domain
release of OS/360 ala http://www.hercules-390.eu/hercfaq.html#2.02

In reality, copyright was extended to cover source code by the Berne convention
in 1976... which meant people published MORE source because binaries weren't
copyrightable and source had at least a little traction. Copyright was extended
to cover binaries by the 1983 Apple vs Franklin lawsuit, before which there WAS
no non-free software. (There was bespoke software, but that's not the same
thing.) Everybody suddenly closed up after that because the law had changed.
Here's IBM's 1983 "Object Code Only" announcement for example:


https://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/ShowDoc.wss?docURL=/common/ssi/rep_ca/6/897/ENUS283-016/index.html

Here's a 1980 audio recording of Bill Gates whining at a journalist that his
lobbying of congress to change copyright law hadn't produced results:

Context: http://maltedmedia.com/books/papers/sf-gates.html
transcript:
https://features.slashdot.org/story/00/01/20/1316236/b-gates-rants-about-software-copyrights---in-1980
Audio: https://landley.net/history/mirror/ms/gates.mp3

Gates couldn't do it (despite his widely mocked 1976 "letter to hobbyists"
trying to bluff people into doing what he wanted), but Steve Jobs could, and
then Gates benefitted more than  Jobs...

(The main difference between Gates and Jobs is William H Gates III had rich
parents and his mom was on the board of director of the Red Cross with the CEO
of IBM, so it was ok to give a lucrative contract to "Mary's Boy", but Steve was
an adopted kid working out of a garage who had to take venture capital to get
manufacturing off the ground, meaning Jobs lost control of his company within 5
years and Gates still owned 45% of microsoft's shared after the IPO. Also, Jobs
was good at industrial design and William H Gates III ("Trey" to his friends)
was a harvard law school dropout who specialized in negotiating exploitative
business contracts and monopoly leverage, so it didn't matter how terrible their
software was if motherboard manufacturers literally couldn't sell hardware that
did NOT come bundled with DOS+Windows.)

Anyway, Unix had already been cloned by then. The first clone passed an IP
challenge by AT&T's legal department somewhere around 1980:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system)
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.folklore.computers/c/_ZaYeY46eb4/m/5B41Uym6d4QJ

AT&T's breakup shortly after Apple vs Franklin (to escape the 1953 consent
decree it operated under and thus commercialize its non-phone technology,
prominently including Unix) also denied Andrew Tanenbaum access to Unix V6 and
the Lions Book as a teaching tool (more or less following in Ken Thompson's
footsteps from his year off to teach at Berkeley in 1975 that gave rise to BSD),
so Tanenbaum wrote his own from-scratch clone called Minix was was not just
ready but self-hosting (including a kernel, compiler, shell, and command line
utilities, and it could rebuild itself under itself) in 3 years. And of course
the complete source code was on a floppy in the back of the textbook, because
that was the POINT...

Stallman's me-too announcement that he was gonna do the same thing as Coherent
and Minix and BSD-Tahoe and so on didn't really make much of a splash? Minix 1.0
came out in 1987, BSD-Tahoe came out in 1988, and a zillion others like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNETix and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNIX and
so on happened long before Linux. GNU never shipped anything usable. Linux was
designed and built under Minix, its first filesystem format was minix, etc.

What stallman DID have was ftp.ai.mit.edu, back when commercial access to the
internet was forbidden due to the DARPA funding, and thus hosting a site
required a government, military, or educational connection. That's why Larry
wall handed over his "patch" program to gnu, despite happily supporting perl on
windows for decades. He didn't care about Stallman's crusade, he just jumped
through the hoops necessary to get hosting back when that wasn't something you
could purchase.

When the NSF's 1993 change to its Acceptable Use Policy allowed commercial
access to the internet (resulting in AOL jumping online and the "september that
never ended"), Stallman's importance RAPIDLY receded. The FSF has collapsed like
a balloon since 1993 because it turns out most people just wanted their code on
an FTP server, and all that nonsense about signing over your copyrights wasn't
worth it once geocities existed. (Let alone sourceforge. Let alone github.)

The "Cathedral" in the 1997 usenix paper "The Cathedral And The Bazaar" was the
FSF's GNU project. No really, the abstract of the paper says as much
(https://www.usenix.org/conference/1998-usenix-annual-technical-conference/software-development-models-cathedral-and-bazaar)
and the paper's author was the maintainer of the Emacs LISP library, who found
himself on the "outside" of the project and unable to sufficiently participate
because he hadn't gone to MIT and didn't live in Boston.

I'm still on that mailing list until they merge cut -DF.

I'm not generally trying to improve coreutils, I'm working to replace it. I have
some history here myself: I used to maintain busybox, currently maintain toybox
(which became Android's command line in 2015), started the first GPL enforcement
suits in the USA, got invited by Eben Moglen to come to NYC to speak with a
bunch of lawyers about copyleft licensing in 2008, have spoken on this topic at
various conferences (Kirk McKusick was in the audience for
https://archive.org/details/OhioLinuxfest2013/24-Rob_Landley-The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Copyleft.flac
and said he quite enjoyed it)...

I wince at people saying "gnu/linux" because I still feel a somewhat responsible
for the gnu/linux crusade that Stallman's been on since I tried to explain
marketing to him back in 1998 and it... didn't go in the direction I expected:
http://www.kerneltraffic.org/kernel-traffic/kt20020805_178.html#1

At least three times in my career I basically yodeled and could not control the
resulting avalanche...

You've taken over from Michael Kerrisk then? I should inform
https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2022/11/30/2#:~:text=biggest%20problem and
friends...

Good to know. (I just randomly stopped getting the emailed updates...)

Ah, there you are on https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/maintaining.html

And when the weather reports start giving temperatures in kelvin... they would
still say "degrees", wouldn't they? It's 267 degrees in Minneapolis today...

Gigabytes can be in base 10 or base 2. They're still gigabytes.

*shrug* If you're maintainer, it's your call. I've said my piece.

It's _possible_ the man page maintainer is not, in isolation, a fully rounded
representative sample on this issue?

Do you expect to change global language usage patterns or just make the man
pages less relevant to their intended audience?

That's exactly how the change will happen, yes. This was published 9 years ago:

https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/two-spaces-after-period/

Blame Tim Berners-Lee. The cultural shift started when HTML rendered all runs of
whitespace as a single space back in 1991. People write what they read.

The web's S-curve of adoption went vertical by 1993 (the NSF AUP switch was
actually a trailing indicator by at least a year, "the well" and such were
already doing grey-zone dialup ISPs as "nonprofits with donations to cover
expenses", and lots of people maintained alumni accounts at college or dialed in
to work after work; AOL suddenly becoming the biggest ISP was noticeable, but
not causative), kellog's started putting its URL on its cereal boxes in 1995.
Shortly before McNeil retired from the McNeil/Lehrer news hour, the ending
credits about sending letters to the editor apologized for having said "snail
mail" the previous day when introducing their email address as a way to contact
them, that was also 1995 I believe? The first phone with web access was the
Nokia 9000 in 1996, Yahoo went public in 1996. (I was apparently the first
financial journalist to cover Google in 1998 and I still have the stickers they
sent me.) The dot-com crash was big news in 2001. The "one billion people
online" articles were ~2005. The first modern smartphones ~2008. The UN report
about more people having smartphones than flush toilets was 2013.

People who learned to type before Y2K had two spaces drilled into them, often on
a manual typewriter, but that stopped being the case about the start of the
dubyah administration, and the standards bodies caught up to normal practice a
few years later. I had to retrain myself to stop doing it in... let's see,
https://landley.net/notes-2011.html has two spaces in the last entry, and
https://landley.net/notes-2012.html had one. So just over 10 years ago. And I am
a VERY late adopter of this sort of thing...

*shrug* Computer history's been a hobby of mine since the 1990s. I like to root
cause things, and dig up WHY they happened, to have proper context to decide
what to do about them.

People got used to reading web pages, which rendered with one space.

There may have been additional justifications for the decision already made, but
those were basically excuses.
if it's correct and nobody does it, it's not correct. The divergence between
"proper" and "common usage" only persists when it's a class-based indicator used
to exclude "those people" from "polite society". You could or couldn't afford to
get the silver ring with the skull on it, and thus know how to point your pinky
and sort forks when having tea with toffs.

Sometimes there were reasons: Latin physically CAN'T split infinitives (they're
not multiple words), so anything translated from latin looks more like the latin
when it keeps the two words together, and when reading things in "the original
latin" is a valuable skill splitting infinitives sticks out as uneducated in a
"you don't know how it works" way, and is held in place by inertia for a while
after that...

Then a single television show goes "to boldly split infinitives that no man has
split before" and goes into constant reruns (desilu productions = desi arnez +
lucille ball, VERY good at the syndication thing) and then has a hit movie come
out where a character who just died recites it as a poignant memorial to himself
just before the closing credits, and THEN a successor/revival series changes
"man" to "one" but does not move the "boldly"... and the rule is quietly retired
because it _lost_.

English! It's a mess. We jettisoned the second person singular because british
nobility started copying the queen (who spoke for the nation, thus always in the
"we are not amused" plural) and it moved downhill until eventually addressing
someone else as thou was fighting words because it meant you considered the
person you were addressing your social inferior (yes the Amish got physically
attacked for this, it's part of the reason they moved). This is also one of
those subtleties in shakespeare, the way he uses "thou" as an insult, because
the transition was ongoing in his time:

https://drmarkwomack.com/engl-3306/handouts/shakespeares-language/thou-and-you-in-shakespeare/

The "great vowel shift" was similar (albeit less well documented) class-based
shenanigans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua

It was an invention.

And I go back and correct my old stuff when I learn better:
https://www.osnews.com/story/25556/understanding-the-bin-sbin-usrbin-usrsbin-split/
was written off the top of my head and I got a couple details wrong (the fast
system disk was 0.5 mb, the 2 rk05 disk packs were 2.5 mb each), and when
https://landley.net/writing/hackermonthly-issue022-pg33.pdf asked to republish
the article I sent them an updated version with bibliographic references. :)

But when I can say WHY something shifted, and that what's already happened at
_best_ underwent a hysteresis transition between metastable states and is now
firmly entrenched in a different local minima... I generally don't waste TOO
much effort trying to push it back all by myself?

I cannot stop people from saying "nucyoolar".
(https://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/13/weekinreview/confronting-noo-kyuh-luhr-proliferation.html
blames eisenhower but he learned it from classified military briefings, meaning
there's a specific military idiot who broke it and we dunno who. Oh well. I
haven't found a recording of Truman saying nuclear, he said "atomic".) Then
again Gigabyte beat out "jigawatt". Gif and Jif are basically soda vs pop
regional variants. Linus Torvalds literally sent people a RECORDING to move
"lienux" to "linux" (which was Red Hat's audio test during setup back when they
had over 50% desktop market share, before the people brought in for the IPO
explained how to eat Sun's lunch).

But do I expect kibibytes to take off? Not really, no. Could be wrong, but...

Rob

Hi Rob,

Right.

:p

:)

That's valid, I think.  And if it's not, everyone would understand.

 > the same way I say "degrees celsius".

Uhh, no, thanks!

Yeah, any of them is fine IMO.  I write from a GNU/Linux distro, but I
admit that I should have maybe said "most programs in Unix-like systems
these days use IEC prefixes".

Me too :)

What would that do?

I guess many should already know.  But yes, feel free to inform.

Yep :)
kelvin” was changed to “kelvin” in 1967 by the 13th CGPM (Resolution 3,
see p. 169)."

So you should say kelvins, not degrees kelvin.

<https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/41483022/SI-Brochure-9-EN.pdf/2d2b50bf-f2b4-9661-f402-5f9d66e4b507?version=1.11&t=1671101192839&download=true#%5B%7B%22num%22%3A372%2C%22gen%22%3A0%7D%2C%7B%22name%22%3A%22Fit%22%7D%5D>
Page 163 (49 in the PDF).

It's possible, but I have my doubts in this case.

By chance, I was having a look at a computer that had RedHat Openshift
open, and the system resources usage view used IEC multipliers (men in
black units).

`free -h` also uses them.  The top(1) manual page also uses "kibibytes"
and other such expanded words.

Honestly, I expect the former.  Not single-handedly, but rather I feel
supported by a lot of (very common) software out there.  I understand
it's not everywhere, but also it's not as if it didn't exist prior to me.

As for the Linux man-pages, at least a few already use these (prior to
me, I believe, since I don't remember changing that):

$ grep -rl -e KiB -e MiB -e GiB man*/
man2/ioctl_getfsmap.2
man2/process_vm_readv.2
man2/add_key.2
man2/execve.2
man2/getrlimit.2
man2/ioctl_fideduperange.2
man2/kexec_load.2
man2/alloc_hugepages.2
man3/btree.3
man4/fd.4
man4/loop.4
man5/proc.5
man7/pipe.7
man7/keyrings.7
man7/units.7

$ grep -rn kibi
man5/tmpfs.5:60:suffix for Ki, Mi, Gi (binary kilo (kibi), binary mega
(mebi), and binary giga
man2/msgctl.2:216:    int msgpool; /* Size in kibibytes of buffer pool
man7/units.7:58:Ki	kibi	2^10 = 1024
man7/units.7:104:the MB are megabytes and the KiB are kibibytes.

It's funny, I'm still in my twenties.  :p

Actually, it comes from much earlier than that.  Have a look at
<https://web.archive.org/web/20171107164742/http://www.heracliteanriver.com/?p=324>

The real reason seems to be that single spaces lowered the quality of
required editors, and thus prices.  It's all about the money.

I do agree with that.  The thing here is that I disagree about it not
being used.  If you look at many commonly-used programs, you'll see it
all over the place: top(1), free(1), fdisk(1), ...

Ahhh, thou is 2nd singular!  That explains many things :).  I learnt
something new today.

I hope you're wrong in this one.  ;)

Cheers,

Alex