Non-standard units, inconsistent with other GNOME apps

Unfortunately, this has already been rejected upstream. If you feel strongly about this, the best place would be to push your case at http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318718 . I'll mark this as Won't Fix in accordance with the unwillingness of the upstream author to make these changes.

I'm confused. I'm reading through "Bug 318718 – Use consistent units in procman" and it looks like the guy labeled "system-monitor developer" agrees strongly with me. That bug reads as if it was a request to use the Microsoft units instead of the standard ones, which is the opposite of what I am asking (and would break consistency with other GNOME apps). But it looks like it was marked WONTFIX, so why are these units being used in the software? Is it a version issue or something? (That bug was in 2006, I'm using System Monitor 2.18.1.1)

To clarify: If I look at my NTFS partition in GNOME Partition Manager (GParted 0.2.5), it is listed as "68.12 GiB". If I look at it in GNOME System Monitor 2.18.1.1, it is listed as "68.1 GB" (which is technically wrong, although Microsoft products have traditionally written things this way). System Monitor should say "68.1 GiB" to reduce confusion and be consistent with other GNOME apps.

We patch gnome-system-monitor to be consistent with the other desktop application, marking "Won't Fix", that's not a bug

There has been a discussion about the units on the ubuntu and debian list in june if you want to read it

So you've intentionally modified gnome-system-monitor to display the wrong units, despite the wishes of the package maintainer, and despite the Linux programmer's manual, in a way that makes it inconsistent with the rest of the GNOME desktop? Why?

What "Linux programmer's manual"? It's not inconsistent with the rest of the desktop, the patch changes the ugly hack used by the gnome-system-monitor maintainer to use the gnome-vfs function. The right place to change the units would be the library, but that's something to discuss upstream and not on the ubuntu bug tracker

The "units" man page. I don't know anything about gnome-vfs, but how can you say it's consistent with the rest of the desktop when I've shown you several GNOME apps that it conflicts with?

Can you confirm that Ubuntu has used a patch to implement a different version of the software that disregards the package maintainer upstream? Is there a way for users to override this and use the official version of the software?

gpart is not a GNOME desktop application. gnome-vfs is the library used by the GNOME desktop to work with drives, volumes, etc. It has a gnome_vfs_format_file_size_for_display() which "Formats the file size passed so that it is easy for the user to read. Gives the size in bytes, kilobytes, megabytes or gigabytes, choosing whatever is appropriate.". The desktop applications are using this library. You can read http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=301838 about the units used and the cange you request. You can rebuild the package with your own set of changes if you want though

I also need to agree with the requester here that even though historically the computer industry has 'fudged' the SI units to suit it's needs, it's wrong. And the correct current international standard is to use the MiB/GiB et al designations for base-2 numbers. From using the "MB" unit designation now there is confusion as to if it's base-10 or base-2 which can and should be avoided.