Scaling: automatic unit ?

[laurent-martin]

Current Problem

I am displaying a transfer speed.
the units counted are bytes, so by default it's bytes/sec
the speed can very between a few kilobytes/s to Gigabytes/s
For the moment I settle on Mbps (mebibit/sec), so I divide by about 2^17.
But if the speed is less than 1Mbps, then it displays zero
and if the seed its > 1Gbps, it's many digits.

            format:      '%t %a %B %p%% %r Mbps %E',
            rate_scale:  lambda{|rate|rate / Environment::BYTES_PER_MEBIBIT},

Potential Solution or New Behavior

Well, It would be interesting to have a way to provide both the value and unit, something like:

        format:      '%t %a %B %p%% %R %E',
        rate_full:  lambda{|rate| "#{rate / Environment::BYTES_PER_MEBIBIT} Mbps"},

Then it's easy to adapt the whole value + unit in a single result.

Mockups

[jfelchner]

I think this is a great idea. Do you want to try to implement it? ;)