improve human readable output

[eworm-de]

Calculate in a loop, use dynamic precision.

[eworm-de]

As there is a new pre-release... Can I have a quick feedback and state on this?

[WayneD]

The current release only has bugfixes in the main code (it's only the adjunct scripts & manpages that got enhancements).

I'm very cautious in making output-affecting changing, but will be giving this a closer look.

[eworm-de]

I can understand you are cautious about making output-affecting changing, guess this is due to breaking scripts that expect specific output?
My changes effect human readable output only, though. 😉 I hope this will not break anything.

[tridge]

@eworm-de could you add a description of the before and after of what this change does? Needs a bit more context than "improve" :-)

[eworm-de]

The commit messages have the details. Are you missing something there or just here in the pull request?

[eworm-de]

This is the output of git log master..:

commit 75ea671e822b347cd4a6656d9913eb9fa89ff600 (HEAD -> human)
Author: Christian Hesse <[email protected]>
Date:   Thu Mar 23 10:33:33 2023 +0100

    human-readable: add an "i" to unit to indicate binary (1024) base

commit 4f215ad2cf7b0dff74db74202412793a9947cadb
Author: Christian Hesse <[email protected]>
Date:   Wed Mar 22 11:07:15 2023 +0100

    human-readable: also handle num < mult with the same code
    
    ... just make sure no precision is added.

commit d4784655035dcfdf02efb30164b181f47546713b
Author: Christian Hesse <[email protected]>
Date:   Tue Mar 21 10:17:09 2023 +0100

    human-readable: use dynamic precision length
    
    Let's lower precision for huge numbers.
    
    The output used to be:
    
      3.45M -> 46.73M -> 523.11M -> 1.24G -> ...
    
    With this change the code always gives the three most significant digits:
    
      3.45M -> 46.7M -> 523M -> 1.24G -> ...

commit 53e4e68e9d5d195679db74e178c4d9e915094236
Author: Christian Hesse <[email protected]>
Date:   Tue Mar 21 10:13:47 2023 +0100

    human-readable: calculate numbers in a loop
    
    This drops a lot of `else if` blocks and extends units
    by "E", "Z" & "Y".

[tridge]

@eworm-de ok, thanks, I normally expect it in the PR message
@WayneD are we concerned about users having parses these messages? Also, should we have a unit test for this?

[eworm-de]

Just added another commit:

commit 7f26b1d2dd34ec39a566d0ba42a43bf22d6d5c46 (HEAD -> human, origin/human)
Author: Christian Hesse <[email protected]>
Date:   Tue Apr 9 09:56:39 2024 +0200

    human-readable: also use it to format rate
    
    Let's also simplify the code for rate in progress, and benefit from
    same functionality.

[eworm-de]

are we concerned about users having parses these messages?

I still stand by my point: This is about human readable output. We should not be worried too much about compatibility with parsers.

[eworm-de]

Any news on this? Does it help if I split this across several pull requests?