bug#36729: 27.0.50; Unclear total in directory listing

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Mattias Engdegård <mattiase@acm.org>
> Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2019 10:19:13 +0200
> Cc: 36729@debbugs.gnu.org, Stephen Berman <stephen.berman@gmx.net>,
>         Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com>
> 
> 19 juli 2019 kl. 14.16 skrev Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>:
> > 
> > Feel free to suggest a clarification in the doc string of 'dired'.
> 
> Frankly, I wouldn't know what to write. That the number should be ignored? 
> We'd better remove it in the first place.

(Your reaction seems to imply that I said something silly.  Did I?)

Your original report was about the unclear units of the value, so a
useful clarification would be to tell something about those units.
That is what I had in mind when I suggested a doc clarification.

> Migrating to a fully built-in directory lister seems to be the only
> sane way out, and it's considerably more work than I anticipated for
> this little detail.

We already have ls-lisp.el.  It isn't used on platforms where 'ls' is
available because AFAIK using 'ls' is faster.