Re: [RFC] GIT user survey

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Jun 25, 2006, 11:06 UTC
Message-ID: <7vfyhtv6iw.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <4d8e3fd30606250347o47c4b200t6feb0406bfa535fa@mail.gmail.com>

"Paolo Ciarrocchi" <paolo.ciarrocchi@gmail.com> writes:

Show 5 quoted lines

> About you
>
>    1. What country are you in?
>    2. What is your preferred language?
>    3. What's your gender?

Demography is interesting and quite relevant to understand the bias in the answers to the rest of the questions, although I do not see much point about #3. Question #2 is relevant in i18n, of course.

I would also ask if the respondent has her own patch in the git.git repository. If most of them are git developers, the answer to the question "was git easy to learn" becomes suspicious, for example.

Show 5 quoted lines

> Getting started with GIT
>
>    1. How did you hear about GIT?
>    2. Did you find GIT easy to learn?
>    3. What helped you most in learning to use it?

Also "When did you start using git?" -- old timers who learned git when it was still young and small would have had an easier time to learn it.

Show 11 quoted lines

> How you use GIT
>
>    1. Do you use GIT for work, unpaid projects, or both?
>    2. How do you obtain GIT?  Source tarball, binary package, or
>       pull the main repository?
>    3. What platforms (hardware, OS, version) do you use GIT on?
>    4. How many people do you collaborate with using GIT?
>    5. How big are the repositories that you work on? (e.g. how many
>       files, how much disk space)
>    6. How many different projects do you manage using GIT?
>    7. Which porcelains do you use?

After seeing the Mercurial survey result, I think question #3 should be stated a bit more concretely. The results having mixture of i386 and Linux are not very interesting. I would also add "how deep the history" to #5.

Show 10 quoted lines

> Getting help, staying in touch
>
>    1. Have you tried to get GIT help from other people?
>          * If yes, did you get these problems resolved quickly and to
>            your liking?
>    2. Do you subscribe to the mailing list?
>          * If yes, do you find it useful, and traffic levels OK?
>    3. Do you use the IRC channel (#git on irc.freenode.net)?
>          * If no, did you know that all of the core developers use
>            IRC, and that there's almost 24-hour help available?

About #3, I do not see some people I consider "core" often on the IRC. Maybe "most of the core".