Mon 7 Jul 2008
Interesting (rough) statistics at the GNOME distributed RCS BOF
Posted by J5 under Gnome[11] Comments
When asked who in the audience
- are GIT users? – roughly 90% of the hands in the room went up
- are BZR users? – less than 5% of the hands in the room went up
- are Hg(Mercurial) users? – roughly the same as BZR, perhaps a few hands less
Converse amongst yourselves.
July 7th, 2008 at 8:18 am
Federico doesnt count as 90% of the audience! But seriously, I think its fairer to say 90% of the hands didn’t go up for any of them.
July 7th, 2008 at 9:04 am
Were you at the same BOF as me? A fair number of people didn’t raise there hands at all.
July 7th, 2008 at 9:33 am
So we can conclude that git users are more likely to attend version control bofs at Guadec.
July 7th, 2008 at 9:37 am
How many of the Git users have used another DVCS to compare?
or… how many of the Git users are git users because of freedesktop.org choice and how many tried different DVCS recently?
So git is more popular at the moment. So?
July 7th, 2008 at 10:25 am
Even if git is more popular than bazaar in certain circles, popularity itself does not imply that git is actually sound. What it does mean is that git is benefiting from network effects [1]. Some examples of inherently flawed (but popular) products which demonstrate this principle are Autotools, MS-Windows, QWERTY keyboard, etc.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
July 7th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
@Vince
So nice of you to share your FUD by only citing negative examples of the network effect. The network effect can also be a positive force, examples can be seen in Wikipedia, or the Internet itself.
July 7th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
@Jeff
What FUD? I never said anything bad about git. I was just saying that it is unwise to make choices based on popularity alone.
July 7th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Keep your pants on. I just wrote what I saw and they were only rough estimates taken for a sea of hands on the git side and just a smattering of people from the Bazaar side. It even surprised me. Read into it any way you like.
James, be honest now, if you were to give a ratio of git to bzr hands would you say it was a landslide in git’s favour and bzr and Hg were around the same number? I would say so.
“So we can conclude that git users are more likely to attend version control bofs at Guadec.” – Mikkel
You can assume what you want but don’t dismiss the data as being irrelevant, especially in light of the fact James had said the only reason he came was specifically to attend the version control sessions. So there are people sent to defend bzr but a good sampling of GNOME users already use git. That is totally relevant to the argument since that is representative of our target audience.
Vincent – you too are dismissing real data. First of all git is sound because well, it has proven itself on projects large and small. A lot of those projects are the foundation on which GNOME is built on. Would you say GNOME is not sound because it is built on top of projects which use git? Also no choices have been made, just stating what I saw and with landslides like those it is hard to back other alternatives.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:47 am
I don’t understand this fan boyish banter over RCS. SVN works now. You can use various mirrors if you have distributed itch to scratch. I would far rather see people focused on the code rather than the RCS du jour.
Sean
July 8th, 2008 at 3:59 am
J5: I’d say that there were roughly twice as many git users who put up there hands, with some overlap between the two (less than I’d have liked to see — those people have a better chance of seeing the similarities and differences between the tools).
Bazaar advocacy is the reason Canonical paid for me to come, but the reason I agreed to come is because it is GUADEC. There are a lot of other things worth discussing.
There was another session held after the first one that seemed a lot more productive, discussing what was actually required of a new revision control system. My feeling was that both Git and Bazaar were missing required features, so there is work to do either way.
July 12th, 2008 at 3:33 am
[...] Palmieri reports that git has the numbers, Tim Penhey replies “not those [...]