Re: [RFC PATCH 1/1] filter-options: Expand abbreviated numbers

Josh Steadmon [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

quoted

-	`rev-list` for possible "filter-spec" values.
+	`rev-list` for possible "filter-spec" values. Clients MUST
+	translate abbreviated numbers (e.g. "1k") into fully-expanded
+	numbers (e.g. "1024") on the client side, so that the server
+	does not need to implement unit parsing.

I suspect that it is too late now to retroactively say "MUST" here.
The best we may be able to do is to say "The sender SHOULD send a
plain integer without unit and the receiver SHOULD be prepared to
scale an integer with unit".

In that case, do you think we should also specify that units should be
interpreted as powers-of-2 rather than powers-of-10?

If we do not document the number scaling elsewhere, then we
certainly should, but I somehow doubt it.

Documentation/git-config.txt does list these explicitly where it
talks about --type=int, but these human-readable scaled integers are
also used in command line arguments as well, so we may want to find
a central place that is clear to the readers that the description
applies to all of them and move the description there.