Re: [Bug-wget] [PATCH] [wget-bug #33210], Add an option to output bandwidth in bits

[Hrvoje Niksic]

Sasikanth <address@hidden> writes:

> No one asked. i had just thought it will be good to display all the output
> in either bits or bytes to avoid confusion to the user (I had
> confused).

I understand that, but I have never seen a downloading agent output data
length in bits, so displaying the data in bits would likely cause much
more confusion and/or be less useful.  (Data throughput in bits, on the
other hand, is quite common.)  With the original implementation of
--bits I expect that someone would soon ask for
--bits-for-bandwidth-only.

> Anyhow thanks I will modify the patch.

Thanks.

Note that the patch has another problem: while Wget's "K", "M", and "G"
refer to (what is now known as) kibibytes, mebibytes, and gibibytes,
bandwidth is measured in kilobits, megabits, and gigabits per second.
Bandwidth units all refer to powers of ten, not to powers of two, so it
is incorrect for calc_rate to simply increase the byte multipliers by 8.

Hrvoje