[6752] in Athena Bugs
Re: rt 7.1H: /usr/lib/units
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Mon Dec 31 02:25:57 1990
From: sethf@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 31 Dec 90 02:25:45 -0500
To: jik@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Cc: bugs@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
>> The currency conversion factors in /usr/lib/units are a decade
> I don't know if it's worth updating them, since they'll just go
> out-of-date again very quickly. In any case, this is a low-priority
Indeed, but they'd be much less out of date. Perfect accuracy is
an unreasonable expectation, but a correction every few years wouldn't
hurt. It's trivial to update.
Assuming the work won't just go into the bitbucket, I
volunteer to make up a new set.
>> There should be a 'disks' unit.
> What would this unit represent? Perhaps I'm an uneducated oaf (shows
> you the value of an MIT education :-), but I don't recall any unit of
> measurement called the "disk."
That's what comes from living a sheltered existence in e40 :-).
You've never heard anybody say
"How many disks is this [program|directory|tar file etc]?" ?
There's ALREADY a unit called the 'rfdisk' in /usr/lib/units. Now, I
haven't seen many people lately trying to figure out whether
such-and-such collection of programs will all fit on their PDP-11 drive,
but the problem of determining just how many floppies one needs to
backup a directory does come up on occasion. Perhaps I'm being a bit
chauvinistic in trying to hog the term 'disk' for what it commonly
signifies to me. How about
ibmlowdisk 360 K
ibmhidisk 1200 K
floppy ibmlowdisk
================
Seth Finkelstein
sethf@athena.mit.edu
