[Bug 42065] Re: installer: confusion about partition sizes (1000 vs. 1024 issue)

[Steve Langasek]

Gparted and fdisk in Ubuntu should never show this as "247MB" and if
they do, that is a bug.  They may show as 247M or as 247MiB.

Anywhere you enter MB in Ubuntu is to be treated as decimal megabytes,
not binary mibibytes".  When units are abbreviated to k, M, G for input
we should be consistent about using the same unit for output.  But it is
impossible to have a single set of units that satisfies everyone.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UnitsPolicy

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/42065

Title:
  installer: confusion about partition sizes (1000 vs. 1024 issue)

Status in partman-base package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  If I enter "64m" as the size of the partition to be created, it will
  correctly create a 64MB (MB=1024^2 bytes, "real MB") partition. But in
  the partition list it gets displayed as "65.8 MB" (MB=1000^2,
  "salesman MB"). This is confusing.

  Please use 1024-based sizes, since it's what administrators are used to and what resembles the internal structure (512Byte sectors, n-bit block addressing) best. 1000-based sizes are mostly a creation of "marketing experts" to make the devices seem larger than they really are.
  A note about this difference in the partition manager could inform novice users why their HD is smaller than expected.

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