Re: [RFC] Git User's Survey 2009 - second trial run, and question about announcing it

From: Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>
Date: Jul 6, 2009, 12:31 UTC
Message-ID: <94a0d4530907060531n264d416u615f6924969dd277@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <4A51B25C.9040904@op5.se>

On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 11:14 AM, Andreas Ericsson<ae@op5.se> wrote:

Show 18 quoted lines

> Felipe Contreras wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 10:45 PM, Jakub Narebski<jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> It's just that somehow for "Git Development Community" a mailing list
>>> is enough.  We don't have official git blog, we don't have bugtracker
>>> (issue tracker).  At the beginning git didn't even had _homepage_.
>>
>> How do you know that? Have you already asked that question in a survey
>> already? ;)
>>
>
> The git developer community flourishes without official blogs, and it
> did so even before we had a webpage. In truth, I visit the mailing
> list archives more often than I visit the webpage. It doesn't *need* a
> blog (or a forum, or a tracker, or whatever), but some people might
> find such things helpful. Personally, I'm a huge fan of having it all
> in one place.

I'm not saying a blog is needed for git to flourish.

I'm saying a blog would help to send official messages.

Show 17 quoted lines

>> As an experiment I added http://gitrss.q42.co.uk/announce.rss to my
>> Google Reader, and through some tricks you can actually see how many
>> people are subscribed to that feed: 26. For reference
>> gitlog.wordpress.com has 28, and Planet IM, a relatively unknown
>> planet: 844.
>>
>> And I have many friends who don't follow git's mailing list, so no, I
>> don't think a mailing list is enough for official announcements.
>>
>
> There are no forums suitable for everyone who are interested in git
> development. We can (sort of) rely on package maintainers for the
> various distros to keep track of groundbreaking changes. People who
> compile from source are sort of on their own if they don't want to
> follow the mailing list or in some other way find out what's going
> on. I don't have a problem with that, and it matches what I'd have
> expected myself if I was building something from source.

I'm not talking about people that compile git, I'm talking about the bulk of the users; the ones who use package management to install git and most of the time don't even know which version they are running nor what new features are available.

In any case, you think there's no need for a blog, I think there is, how about the rest of the users? Isn't that a question suitable for asking in the survey?

-- 
Felipe Contreras