[RFC] Git User's Survey 2008

It's been around a year since last Git User's Survey. It would be interesting to find what changed since then. For example to see if there were visible improvements in easing learning curve and in usability. Therefore the idea to have another survey.

(If there is no suck^W volunteer to create survey, announce it, and finally summarize results and publish summary on Git Wiki, I would do the 2008 survey.)

First there is a question about the form of survey. Should we use web based survey, as the survey before (http://www.survey.net.nz), sending emails with link to this survey, or perhaps do email based survey, with email Reply-To: address put for this survey alone? Should we use the same web survey service as before (found by Paolo Ciarrocchi for first, 2006 survey, and used also for 2007 survey), or is there one better (it would better be free, and without limitations on the number of responses; in 2006 there were around 117 responses, in 2007 there were 683 individual responses).

Second, what questions should be put in the survey, and in the case of single choice and ultiple choice questions what possible answers should be? I'd rather avoid free-form questions, even if they are more interesting, as they are PITA to analyse and summarize, especially to create some kind of histogram from free-form replies data (some of 2007 free-form responses are not fully summarized even now). Below are slightly extended questions from the last survey. Please comment on it.

Third, where to send survey to / where to publish information about the survey? Last year the announcement was send to git mailing list, to LKML (Linux kernel mailing list), and mailing list for git projects found on GitProjects page on GIT wiki. Now that the number of projects using Git as version control system has grown, I don't think it would be good idea to "spam" all those mailing list; and if we don't send notice to all other projects I'm not sure if we should include LKML. Last year survey announcement was put on Git Homepage (thanks Pasky), and on front page of Git Wiki; info about survey was also put on two git hosting sites: kernel.org and repo.or.cz. It would be nice if it was possible to put announcement about Git User's Survey 2008 at front pages of other Git hosting sites, like GitHub (one of most popular, I think), Gitorious, Freedesktop.org. If you know some other popular Git hosting sites, and even better if you know who to contact about putting survey announcement, please write. Is there some channel that I have forgot about? Should info/announcement about Git User's Survey 2008 be sent also to one of on-line magazines like LinuxToday or LWN, or asked to put on some blog? I'll add it as journal entry for #git on Ohloh, and try to make it so it would appear in "News" section for Ohloh project page for Git: http://www.ohloh.net/projects/git.

Fourth, how long should the survey last? When sending announcement we should say where notice about Git User's Survey 2008 should be taken down. Last year the survey was meant to take three weeks, but was up longer.

Below there is initial version of announcement email (I should probably come up also with boilerplate announcement for web pages), and initial version of this year round of questions. Comments are prefixed by '+', and does not mean to be included in the survey text.

---- Hi all,

We would like to ask you a few questions about your use of the Git version control system. This survey is mainly to understand who is using Git, how and why.

The results will be published to the Git wiki and discussed on the git mailing list.

We'll close the survey in <duration> starting from today, <date>.

Please devote a few minutes of your time to fill this simple questionnaire, it will help a lot the git community to understand your needs, what you like of git, and of course what you don't like of it.

The survey can be found here:
  <survey URL>
----
About you

   01. What country are you in?
   02. What is your preferred non-programming language?
  (or) What is the language you want computer communicate with you?
   03. How old are you (in years)?
       (free form, integer)
   04. Which programming languages you are proficient with?
       (The choices include programming languages used by git)
       (zero or more: multiple choice)
     - C, shell, Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk
     + (should we include other languages, like C++, Java, PHP,
        Ruby,...?)

Getting started with GIT

   05. How did you hear about Git?
       (single choice?, in 2007 it was free-form)
     - Linux kernel news (LKML, LWN, KernelTrap, KernelTraffic,...),
       news site or magazine, blog entry, some project uses it,
       presentation or seminar (real life, not on-line), SCM research,
       IRC, mailing list, other Internet, other off-line, other(*)
     + the problem is with having not very long list (not too many
       choices), but spanning all possibilities.
     + is this question interesting/important to have in survey?
   06. Did you find GIT easy to learn?
     - very easy/easy/reasonably/hard/very hard
   07. What helped you most in learning to use it?
       (free form question)
   08. What did you find hardest in learning Git?
       What did you find harderst in using Git?
       (free form question)
   09. When did you start using git? From which version?
     - pre 1.0, 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5
     + might be important when checking "what did you find hardest" etc.
     + perhaps we should ask in addition to this question, or in place
       of this question (replacing it) what git version one uses; it
       should be multiple choice, and allow 'master', 'next', 'pu',
       'dirty (with own modifications)' versions in addition.

Other SCMs (shortened compared with 2007 survey)

   10. What other SCM did or do you use?
       (zero or more: multiple choice)
     - CVS, Subversion, GNU Arch or arch clone (ArX, tla, ...),
       Bazaar-NG, Darcs, Mercurial, Monotone, SVK, AccuRev, Perforce,
       BitKeeper, ClearCase, MS Visual Source Safe, MS Visual Studio
       Team System, custom, other(*)
   10b.If you selected other above, what SCM it was?
       (free form)
   11. Why did you choose Git? (if you use Git)
       What do you like about using Git?
       (free form, not to be tabulated)
   12. Why did you choose other SCMs? (if you use other SCMs)
       What do you like about using other SCMs?
       Note: please write name of SCMs you are talking about.
       (free form, not to be tabulated).

How you use Git

   13. Do you use Git for work, unpaid projects, or both?
       (single choice)
     - work/unpaid projects/both
   14. How do you obtain Git?
     - binary package/source package or source script(*)/
       source tarball/pull from main repository
       (*) this includes source based distributions like Gentoo
     + added new option: source package or source script
     + should this be multiple choice?
   15. What operating system do you use Git on?
       (one or more: multiple choice, as one can use more than one OS)
     - Linux, *BSD (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.), MS Windows/Cygwin,
       MS Windows/msysGit, MacOS X, other UNIX, other
     + "What hardware platforms do you use GIT on?" question was
       removed; should it stay?
   15b.If you selected "other UNIX", or "other", what operating system
       or systems it was/were?
       (free form)
   16. Which porcelains / interfaces / implementations do you use?
       (zero or more: multiple choice)
     - core-git, Cogito (deprecated), StGIT, Guilt, pg (deprecated),
       Pyrite, Easy Git, IsiSetup, jgit, my own scripts, other
   16b.If you selected "other porcelain", what is its name?
       (free form)
   17. Which git GUI (commit tool or history viewer, or both) do you use
       (zero or more: multiple choice)
     - CLI, gitk, git-gui, qgit, gitview, giggle, tig, instaweb,
       (h)gct, qct, KGit, git-cola / ugit, GitNub, Pyrite, git.el, other
   17b.If you selected "other GUI", what is its name?
       (free form)
   18. Which (main) git web interface do you use for your projects?
       (zero or more: multiple choice)
     - gitweb, cgit, wit (Ruby), git-php, viewgit (PHP), other
     + should there be a question about web server (Apache, IIS, ...)
       used to host git web interface?
   18b.If you selected "other web interface", what it was?
       (free form)
   19. How do you publish/propagate your changes?
       (zero or more: multiple choice)
     - push, pull request, format-patch + email, bundle, other
   19b.If the way you publish your changes is not mentioned above, how
       do you publish your changes?
       (free form)
   20. Does git.git repository include code produced by you?
     - yes/no

What you think of Git

   21. Overall, how happy are you with Git?
     - unhappy/not so happy/happy/very happy/completely ecstatic
   22. How does Git compare to other SCM tools you have used?
     - worse/equal (or comparable)/better
   23. What would you most like to see improved about Git?
       (features, bugs, plug-ins, documentation, ...)
   24. If you want to see Git more widely used, what do you
       think we could do to make this happen?
     + Is this question necessary/useful?  Do we need wider adoption?

Changes in Git (since year ago, or since you started using it)

   25. Did you participate in previous Git User's Surveys?
       (zero or more, multiple choice)
     - 2006, 2007
   26. How do you compare current version with version from year ago?
     - current version is: better/worse/no changes
   27. Which of the following features do you use?
       (zero or more: multiple choice)
     - git-gui or other commit tool, gitk or other history viewer, patch
       management interface (e.g. StGIT), bundle, eol conversion,
       gitattributes, submodules, separate worktree, reflog, stash,
       shallow clone, detaching HEAD, mergetool, interactive rebase,
       add --interactive or other partial commit helper, commit
       templates, bisect, other (not mentioned here)
     + should probably be sorted in some resemblance of order
     + are there any new features which should be listed here?
   28. If you use some important Git features not mentioned above,
       what are it?
       (free form)

Documentation

   29. Do you use the Git wiki?
    -  yes/no
   30. Do you find Git wiki useful?
    -  yes/no/somewhat
   31. Do you contribute to Git wiki?
    -  yes/no/only corrections or spam removal
   32. Do you find Git's on-line help (homepage, documentation) useful?
    -  yes/no/somewhat
   33. Do you find help distributed with Git useful
       (manpages, manual, tutorial, HOWTO, release notes)?
    -  yes/no/somewhat
   34. What could be improved on the Git homepage?
       (free form)
   35. What could be improved in Git documentation?
       (free form)

Getting help, staying in touch

   36. Have you tried to get Git help from other people?
    -  yes/no
   37. What channel did you use to request help?
       (zero or more: multiple choice)
    -  git mailing list, git users group, IRC, blog post, 
       other
    +  this is one question which doesn't need, I think, explanation
       of "other" choice
   38. If yes, did you get these problems resolved quickly
       and to your liking?
    -  yes/no
   39. Would commerical (paid) support from a support vendor
       be of interest to you/your organization?
    -  yes/no/not applicable
   40. Do you read the mailing list?
    -  yes/no
   41. If yes, do you find it useful?
    -  yes/no (optional)
   42. Do you find traffic levels on Git mailing list OK.
    -  yes/no? (optional)
   43. Do you use the IRC channel (#git on irc.freenode.net)?
    -  yes/no
   44. If yes, do you find IRC channel useful?
    -  yes/no (optional)
   45. Did you have problems getting GIT help on mailing list or
       on IRC channel? What were it? What could be improved?
       (free form)

Open forum

   46. What other comments or suggestions do you have that are not
       covered by the questions above?
       (free form)

Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> writes:

Shouldn't we at least name the ones we have specific support in our Makefile instead of blanketting them into one "other Unices"? We may not necessarily want to list all of them, but at least major ones like SunOS, HP-UX and AIX deserve to be listed, methinks.

I think the removal of "hardware platform" question is a good idea.

My stance on this has always been that wider adoption, even though it might eventually come as a consequence of being the best in the field, is never a goal.

The above is a valid and interesting question, but "Which features do you find unique and useful ones, compared to other systems?" would be another interesting question to ask to people with experience with other systems.

"rerere"?

Which mailing list?  Do we want to ask about alternative lists?

I am not sure how and where, but I think j/egit should also be mentioned and/or asked about.

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 09:39:29PM -0700, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Last time I checked git did not build on HP-UX (11.11) out of the box because its 'install' did not support -d nor -m. There are a few more issues installed here:

http://hpux.connect.org.uk/hppd/cgi-bin/wwwtar?/hpux/Development/Tools/git-1.5.6.2/git-1.5.6.2-src-11.11.tar.gz+git-1.5.6.2/HPUX.Install+text

So I think the word "we support" is a bit too strong. ;-)

Being more constructive, what a user using HP-UX is supported to do?

1) Use the patched git from HP.

2) Have coreutils installed. (But then I think it would be good to list
this dependency in INSTALL.)

3) Patch git to use automake's install-sh. (Would such a patch be ever
accepted?)

Thanks.

PS: No, I rarely use git on HP-UX, but I would be happy to bring the
equivalent of HP's most changes to git.git if possible.

On Wed, 23 July 2008, Miklos Vajna wrote:

It would be good idea, although "POSIX-compliant shells" implies coreutils somewhat; shell scripts usually do require some utilities, like sed, grep, cat, test etc.

I think it would. It would allow us also to uncomment the AC_PROG_INSTALL line in configure.ac file to find 'install' automatically (autoconf requires having install.sh or install-sh fallback in the sources).

The problem is coming up with minimal yet portable (at least as portable as git itself) fallback install.sh script.

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 11:38:00PM +0200, Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:

Sure, but we already use test_cmp instead of diff -u, avoid grep -a, etc. These tricks are for running without GNU coreutils, I guess.

I just checked automake-1.10.1's install-sh script, it works properly with HP-UX's ksh.

I think it would be possible to:

1) Just use it: in long-term this would mean no additional maintenance
cost, since if any problem occurs, it could be just updated from
automake.

2) Or make it as minimal as possible: As far as I see the current git
build system just uses the -d and -m switches, so the support for the
-c, -C, -g, -o, -s, -t and -T switches could be removed. This way we
would get a minimal install-sh, but then it would have to be maintained
inside git.git.

I think 1) would be better.

On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, Junio C Hamano wrote:

There will be a place to specify what "other Unices" one uses; in last survey (see http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitSurvey2007) there were 5 SunOS users, and only 1 for HP-UX and 1 for AIX (unless I have miscounted: it was free form question in 2007 survey).

But perhaps it would be good idea to add Solaris, SunOS, AIX, HP-UX, and perhaps also "MS Windows (unknown)" to the list.

I was thinking about adding "Number of cores, and number of CPUs" question instead; it might be also interesting how many people use 32-bit machine (e.g. i386), and how much 64-bit (e.g. x86_64).

But this is just curiosity; I don't think it matters to Git code what machine it is run on. Operating system info is more important, as some of OS are either not POSIX, or have default filesystems with strange features.

And I'd rather limit number of questions in the survey...

O.K. I'll remove this question, then. Which is nice, as I'd rather have this survey be shorter (it is easier both on survey takers, and also later in survey analysis).

I forgot about "keeping uncommitted changes in working tree", aka
"working with dirty tree" (I don't know if it is popular enough
to be included, but it _is_ one of distinguishing features).
 

Good idea.  I think I add it to the survey.

As it is not visible feature, one might use it without knowledge of it. That is why I am reluctant to include it in the above list. One can always add it in free-form.

Good idea. So it would be... err, I realized that I don't know if j/egit has separate mailing list, and what it is. egit is listed in "porcelains" one can use.

Nevertheless it would be good, I think, to expand list of possible choices for this question:

    40. Do you read the mailing list?
        (multiple choice: zero or more; "none" is just in case)
     -  none/git@vger.kernel.org/Git For Human Beings/msysGit

Junio C Hamano wrote:

I've got lost a little bit in this discussion, but some question about used GUI for Git maybe interesting - the above one is touching the problem. Just egit is missing there.

(...)

There is no separate mailing list for j/egit, we just used private mails for some discussions/less important notifications.

Hi,

On Thu, 24 Jul 2008, Marek Zawirski wrote:

I hope not for too much, because this is one of the lessons of last year's GSoC (and to a large degree this year's Gitorrent project): if you keep the project too secret, nobody will know, and as a consequence nobody will care.

Ciao, Dscho

Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:

We've done most patch review discussions right here on git@vger, but yea, some stuff happens in private. I think what happens in private this year on egit is really just the standard mentor-student working relationship prior to posting patches for discussion.

"Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org> writes:

Sorry for causing confusion in the discussion, but I was not talking about "mailing list on e/jgit".

What I meant was that we might want to have a few more questions about e/jgit as an independent entity in the survey, as it is a completely different re-implementation of the same git theme.

On Fri, 25 Jul 2008, Junio C Hamano wrote:

[cut]

There are two questions about egit/jgit planned for the survey:

   16. Which porcelains / interfaces / implementations do you use?
       (zero or more: multiple choice)
     - core-git, Cogito (deprecated), StGIT, Guilt, pg (deprecated),
       Pyrite, Easy Git, IsiSetup, _jgit_, my own scripts, other(*)

   27. Which of the following features do you use?
       (zero or more: multiple choice)
     - Integration with IDE/editor (Eclipse, Emacs, TextMate,...)
       ...

What question about egit/jgit would you like to have in the survey?

Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:

pg should come out of this list in this version of the survey. It never had a large user base and all of those users should have moved away to something else by now.

Cogito has also been deprecated, and maybe should be removed from the list, but it did have a larger user base so maybe we keep it on this survey and we remove it from the next?

I'm not certain what else I would want to ask that is egit/jgit specific.

"Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org> writes:

If you do not have any specific questions you would want to see answers to, then my point was moot, which is fine.

Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:

Actually I'd like the editor integration to be broken out (if it isn't already) so we can see which editors (and thus which integrations) are popular among users. I think it would help all of the integration authors, as well as make it clear to end-users where we have integration available/under development, in case they were not aware of it previously.

On Sat, 26 July 2008, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:

So you would like to see something like the following question in the upcoming Git User's Survey?

   xx. Which editors/IDEs/RADs do you use?
       (zero or more; multiple choice with 'other')
    -  Emacs, Vim, Eclipse, KDevelop, Anjuta, TextMate, Notepad++,
       Visual Studio, other
    +  what choices should be in the list of editors and IDE;
       or should perhaps this question be free-form?

Jakub Narebski wrote:

(...)

If we stay with hard coded list of IDEs, I'd add NetBeans to this list.

I have an impression that quite many folks are asking about NetBeans support for Git. Particularly, comparison between number of Eclipse and NetBeans users using Git is interesting matter for potential jgit usage.

Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:

I think we should list explicitly any editor that we have Git integration for, or which we know is popular and people have asked about in the past, and leave an other for people to enter other editors.

We know about Emacs, Vim, Eclipse, TextMate all having some sort of Git integration. We know people have asked about NetBeans, KDevelop and Anjuta. After that yea, Notepad++ and Visual Studio are two commonly used tools that people may use.

Anyone know of anything missing from this list?

Le 08-07-26 à 17:50, Shawn O. Pearce a écrit :

XCode

- jfv

On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 04:57:07PM -0500, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:

Even recently, I've found a lot of people still using Cogito. I would keep it in the survey in this round and in next years, decide based on the share it gets this time.

				Petr "Pasky" Baudis

On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 04:57:07PM -0500, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:

Just a thought - how about a question polling whether people would be interested in build tool wrappers around jgit - ant tasks, maven plugins, etc.?

Cheers.

Jing Xue <jingxue@digizenstudio.com> writes:

True, there are a lot of tools written in Java, which have or could have support for Git: Ant tasks, Maven plugins, Hudson rules (continuous integration), JIRA (bug/issue tracker). Some of them perhaps could use jgit, although if I understand correctly jgit is not yet full implementation of Git: it is enough for egit, for local clone of repository.

I don't have any idea how to formulate such question. I think however that "hijacking" Git User's Survey to ask a bunch of jgit/egit questions would be a good idea. (By the way I have though about asking for feature requests for gitweb...)

I wonder if similar tools like mentioned above, but for the Ruby camp, like Capistrano, Merb, Gitosis, whatever use git directly, or do they use Ruby interface (and which interface). I don't think there is implementation of Git in Ruby... hmmmm....

Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:

  What Java based build tools would you like to see Git support in?
  (choose zero or more, multiple choice)
  Ant, Maven, Hudson, JIRA, other
 

There is an implementation in Ruby, but I'm not sure what its state is.

On Sat, 26 July 2008, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:

Some of those tools have more or less official support for Git, for
example there is Git plugin for Hudson (e.g. continuous integration)
  http://hudson.gotdns.com/wiki/display/HUDSON/Git+Plugin
and Maven SCM git provider
  http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/SCM-182

What it is? URL or name, please?

It looks like alternate Git implementation are cropping left and right: jgit in Java, widgit/Git-R-Done and git# GSoC Mono project in C#,... but not all of them maturing.

Hi,

On Sat, 26 Jul 2008, Jakub Narebski wrote:

Seems as if git# is actively worked on, by a user called "igfgt1".  See

	http://code.google.com/p/mono-soc-2008/source/browse/

However, it appears that the same problem as last year is happening: no communication with those that could help -- us. For example, the latest change in git# adds a method to "Blob" that returns the content. Which is obviously read once, never to be freed.

I know that it is unfair to rant here, but on the other hand: it is not my itch, and I have tons of other stuff to do.

Ciao, Dscho

On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 10:51 AM, Shawn O. Pearce <spearce@spearce.org> wrote:

The most up-to-date project is 'Grit', a spinoff of the GitHub site. It has a number of things implemented in pure-ruby and is under active development. It runs GitHub, Gitorious, GitNub (osx tool), etc.

http://github.com/mojombo/grit/tree/master

Scott

On Tue, 24 July 2008, Marek Zawirski wrote:

Actually jgit is in the list of possible choices for the following
question:
    16. Which porcelains / interfaces / implementations do you use?

But you have remind me about one feature that is missing from the 27. list, namely "integration with IDE/editor" (I mean here things like egit for Eclipse, future KDevelop DVCS integration, future Anjuta Git integration, git.el or DVC for Emacs, plugin for TextMate, etc.)

Hi,

On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, Jakub Narebski wrote:

Some people prefer to stay anonymous, so I think email is out.

Yes, I think this should be a long list.

Is it possible to have multiple choice, with "other" (free-form)? Then I'd suggest:

	Colleague/Instructor, User Manual, Manpages, Tutorials, Tutorials 
	(elsewhere; not in git.git), Mailing list, IRC, Git Wiki, Other.

s/harderst/hardest.

Again, I'd suggest a multiple choice + Other:

	The amount of commands, the amount of options, the index (AKA 
	staging), branching, user interface, bugs, Other.

PVCS seems to be pretty popular, too.

Again, to avoid hassles with free-form:

	Mandatory: work, mandatory: open source project I am participating 
	in, speed, scalability, It's What Linus Uses, Other.

Again:

	ease-of use, simplicity, existing project uses it, I Do Not Like 
	Linus, Other

You should include "Dunno", which gets automatically mapped to "MS Windows/msysGit" ;-)

git svn

You might laugh, but it is a sad fact that some guy promotes "Using Git with Google Code" by using git-svn to drive their crappy Subversion.

Maybe here should be another question "What are the most useful features of Git?" but maybe that is covered by earlier questions.

I agree with Junio: this is not so interesting for us; we are no company, and we have no sales department who could wank of on these answers.

For our Windows friends, we should add " (crlf)" to the last item.

/too low?  *ducksandrunsforcover*

/somewhat.  Even if I would be the only one choosing that option.

Yeah, I know who will answer to that, and what... "yaddayadda very unfriendly yaddayadda especially that Johannes guy yaddayadda" (you know who you are)... *lol*

Thanks Jakub, I think that your effort is very useful.

Ciao, Dscho

On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

I'd rather not have a "laundry list" of languages.  I have put C++
because QGit uses it, Java because of egit/jgit, PHP for web
interfaces, Ruby because of GitHub and because of Ruby comminity
choosing Git.  I should perhaps add Emacs Lisp, HTML+CSS and
JavaScript here.  What other languages should be considered?
 

By "Tutorials (elsewhere; not in git.git)" you mean here many various "git guide" pages, like "Git for Computer Scientists", "Git Magic", etc.?

I'm not sure about having multiple choice vs. free-form question here. Multiple choice is easier to analyze, especially if one would want histogram of replies... but free form is more rich. But perhaps multiple choice with free-form "other" choice would be the best?

Besides proposed choices limit person filling the survey to single understanding of "what helped you in learning to use Git", which can be also understood as asking for list of features helping with learning Git, not only list of documentation and such.

Here it can be hard to come up with good list of choices. For example among responses in 2007 survey there were 'inconsistent commands', 'obtuse command messages', 'insufficient/hard to use documentation', and many more.

I'm not sure if troubles with coming with extensive but not too large list of options for this question is worth it; I think that we need only list of responses, and not number of responses (perhaps mentioning which one occur [much] more frequently).

O.K., I'll add it.  I think I'd better add RCS too.

Free form has some hassles. Because here histogram of responses might be interesting, perhaps it would be good to use multiple choice here.

I would add "features" and/or "unique features" to the list, and also perhaps "being popular/hype".

Again: free form has some hassles, but so does coming up with good
choice of fixed answers in multiple choice question.  I'll add
"ease to install on MS Windows" (or something like that) if we decide
to have this question multiple choice.

O.K.  I'll add "git-svn (or other to foreign SCM)".

I think it is.  I'd rather try to reduce number of questions...

I'll remove it, then.

Right.  Thanks.

???

I'm sorry about that: I have forgot that this and all similar questions had triple choice: yes/no/somewhat in the final version of 2007 survey. I'll correct it.

:-)

Hi,

On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, Jakub Narebski wrote:

C# at least, since we had one (pretty unsuccessful) attempt at reimplementing Git in it.

Uhm, yes, you are right. Why not have multiple choice, with "other") (free-form)?

Well, was worth a try ;-)

Ciao, Dscho

onsdagen den 23 juli 2008 15.18.40 skrev Johannes Schindelin:

What is the reason for the question? Do we want to know what languages people would like to contribute to Git in or do we want to know what "kind" of programmers are attracted by Git? Making it a long list should make it easier to tabulate the responses.

-- robin

Hi,

On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, Robin Rosenberg wrote:

"could contribute" is more appropriate IMHO. Although you might be right to ask "would like to contribute"... ;-)

Ciao, Dscho

Dnia środa 23. lipca 2008 18:00, Johannes Schindelin napisał:

I think it is both. We would like to know what kind of programmers (and non-programmers) are attracted to Git, and also what languages could people contribute to Git.

Dnia środa 23. lipca 2008 16:54, Robin Rosenberg napisał:

The idea is, I think, to know what languages people could contribute
to Git; see analysis of this question at GitSurvey2007 page on git wiki:
  http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitSurvey2007#head-ecb5564d71e4093e2e93e508380407a26dbcbdea

C++ is for QGit, Java for egit/jgit, C# for git#/widgit and perhaps Git-Cheetah, PHP for web interfaces, Ruby because of GitHub, Python because some contrib is in Python, Emacs Lisp for git.el, HTML+CSS and JavaScript for web interfaces; perhaps we should also add AsciiDoc for documentation. And of course "I am not programmer" response...

But I'm not too tied to this question; I guess it can be simply removed if it doesn't offer some important (for us) information.

Hi,

On Thu, 24 Jul 2008, Jakub Narebski wrote:

widgit is _dead_.

C# for Git-Cheetah?  Over my dead cold body.

Ciao, Dscho "who still shakes his head that Jakub could even _think_ that"

Hi,

Jakub Narebski wrote:

[...]

Oha, is this a Git User's Survey or a Git Potential Contributor's Survey? I thought this is some kind of demographic question about the "programming background" of the user.

This doesn't make sense, does it? I know that there are non-programmer's who use git for there configuration files and other non-programming track files, but this looks somehow wrong in this survey.

Regards.

On Thu, 24 Jul 2008, Stephan Beyer wrote:

there are non-programmers who use git to track projects that they want to be able to run the latest versions of. they don't program, just git pull; make;make install

David Lang

Hi,

david@lang.hm wrote:

Ahh, you're totally right. :) I wonder if those users take part in a Git User's Survey. We'll see. :)

Stephan

On Thu, 24 Jul 2008, Stephan Beyer wrote:

it depends on how it gets sent out.

if it's just sent to the git lists you won't have many of those users, if it's sent to lists of projects that use git (and/or publicised in the newsletters of those projects) we'll get a lot more of them.

due to the concern abot spamming too many lists, I'd suggest getting in contact with the project leaders and see what they would like or not like. I suspect that many of them will be happy to have the survey go out to their users so that git can improve based on the feedback and their users can think less about git and more about their project ;-)

if most of the project leaders are willing or eager to get the info out it seems reasonable to go ahead and send a single message out to the other lists, but if a lot of them are opposed, definantly don't send it anywhere you didn't get a response.

David Lang

On Tue, 24 July 2008, Stephan Beyer wrote:

Well, truth to be told it is both.  We try here to kill two birds with
one stone: both to have 'programming background' of Git users, and get
to know which parts of code can have many contributors, and which
could have troubles attracting contributors because of the language
they are written in (which is visible in the choice of programming
languages in 2007 survey).
 
If we want to provide larger number of programming languages to
chose from (with "other" as fallback), we could take for example
top 10 from the TIOBE index, or similar sites:
  http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html (for July 2008)
  http://lui.arbingersys.com/index.html (Language Usage Indicators, Jul 10, 2008)

This would bring 'Visual Basic', and perhaps 'Assembly' and 'Lisp' to the list of choices.

You can manage documents and like (especially written in some formatting language), you can manage web pages, you can also use git to only _track_ some projects even if you are not a programmer yourself.

See for example
  http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2008/06/29/git-bibs/
  http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/86
  http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=33830
  http://www.secomputing.co.uk/2008/06/engineering-log-book.html

On Thu, 24 July 2008, Jakub Narębski wrote:

Perhaps also consider GitHub's list of most popular languages
  http://github.com/blog/99-popular-languages
(as mentioned in Petr 'Pasky' Baudis somewhere in git-scm.com thread)
to take into account git popularity among web developers.

This would add 'ERB' (or is it just subset of 'Ruby' as eRuby implementation?), and 'Common Lisp' (if 'Common Lisp', then probably also 'Scheme'/'Guile').

There is always free-form 'other'...

On 7/26/08, Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:

I have an impression that this 'erb' is a file extension for html file with embedding ruby, used in ruby on rails. If so it's not worth adding. If you are going to add Scheme, please remove Guile or you have to list other Scheme implementations too.

Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> writes:

I refrained saying this in my initial response, but my initial reaction was "Why are you even asking this?".

Yes, "getting to know you" demographics are customary done in surveys, and you kept it to the minimum which is also good, but I do not think this particular question is very interesting. For one thing, the question assumes the participant is a programmer, and we are giving an impression that we are interested in better programmers. Do we *still* require users to be a programmer to use git? I do not think so. Having to answer "none of these" to this question would make you feel unnecessarily bad, even if you are not a programmer and you know at the intellectual level that it is not your flaw not to be proficient in any.

Asking about geographic location and preferred human languages might help to gauge what l10n are desired for GUIs, but even there, don't forget that we are no company. We do not research markets and translate messages to missing languages, however popular, before being asked. That's not how we operate. So the result of these questions will be mainly to satisfy our curiosity, nothing more.

"What kind of content do you track" might also be an equally interesting question. It also falls into the curiosity department, though.

And when you expect very many respondents, (1) you cannot afford to free-form; and (2) statistics over multiple choices, as long as choices are well seeded, will give you a good enough overview picture.

You need to do at least one or the other, and I do not think there is any way to avoid that. Without a good choices, histogram would become useless (not necessarily because the answer will be dominated by "Other", but the seeing the choices tends to set the frame of mind when/before somebody answers the question). With free-form, you will spend the rest of your life analyzing to get any useful insight.

On Wed, 23 July 2008, Junio C Hamano wrote:

The idea, I think, was to gauge which parts of Git would be hard to
find developers for, because of small number of people proficient in
the programming language the part is written in.  I'm thinking here
about Tcl/Tk and gitk and git-gui, see
  http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitSurvey2007#head-ecb5564d71e4093e2e93e508380407a26dbcbdea

Nevertheless, _if_ this question is to stay (I am not sure one way or another), we would better add "I am not programmer" or something like that to the list of possible answers.

It would also answer question if adding support for i18n in git, for example support for translating git commands messages, is something which people would want or not. If they would be translated or not it would depend on people, but one cannot even begin translation efforts if there is no infrastructure in place.

But as the rest of localization / internationalization / translation questions ("What do you need translated?" for example) were removed from proposed set of questions for this year survey, perhaps this question should be removed as well.

True.

What should be the list of possible choices? Source code, documentation, configuration, backup, binary files, other?

I wonder how many responses will we get this year. In 2006 there were around 117 responses (but IIRC it was announced only on git mailing list, wasn't it?), in 2007 survey there were 683 individual responses. Git is even more popular now, I think...

OTOH there are some questions, like "feature requests/proposals" question which *do require* free-form question. But they should be few, and preferably for questions for which we don't need histogram of replies.

I'll convert as much questions as possible to multiple choice (pre-seeded), trying to come up with a good set of canned responses.

A question: if analysis of responses was not a problem, do you prefer free form, or "select a choice" question?

True... well, depending of course on the number of replies. Analysing around 50 free-form replies (half of 100 individual responses to survey) is not impossible; analysing 250+ is a lot of work.

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 11:53:27AM +0200, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

If we move away from free-form, it should be much more choices here.

- Ability to work offline
- Cryptographic authentication of history.
- Distributed development (pull/push from/to more than one remote repo)
- Easy to extend functionality through scripting
- Efficient storage model
- Elegant design
- Fast
- Good community support
- Rewriting patches before publishing (git rebase, commit --amend)
- Scalability (Efficient handling of large projects)
- Strong support for non-linear development
- Support of wide range of protocols for synchronization.
...

Dmitry

Hi,

On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, Dmitry Potapov wrote:

Cryptographically strong integrity check.  There is no authentication.

Yeah, I would tick all of them, too.

Ciao, Dscho

Hi,

Dmitry Potapov wrote:

Heh, I can imagine git users reading that survey and thinking
 "What? Git allows me to rewrite patches before publishing?
  And it provides cryptographic integrity? Sounds good. *click*"

Nevertheless, the list is fine ;) Perhaps also: "Good reputation".

Regards.

On Wed, 23 July 2008, Stephan Beyer wrote:

Perhaps also: "Because it is popular (hype)", and I hope that "Ability to track code movement" would have any takers. Although it is hard to distinguish between 'reasons to choose' and 'favourite features' list; let's make it more 'reasons to choose' (like "feature rich").

"Good documentation", perhaps, too?

Johannes Schindelin, Wed, Jul 23, 2008 11:53:27 +0200:

a converter using fast-import/fast-export/plumbing

On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, Alex Riesen wrote:

 
So it would be now:

   19. How do you publish/propagate your changes?
       (zero or more: multiple choice)
     - push, git-svn, foreign SCM (not via git-svn), pull request,
       format-patch + email, bundle, other(*)
     + (*)If the way you publish your changes is not on above list,
       please explain how do you publish your changes.

Hi,

Jakub Narebski wrote:

Then we should use a web-based survey, because e-mail-based will always be used to write free-form answers, I think.

So for multiple choice questions an "Other" item is often useful, but -- if the survey service allows it -- I'd prefer if the "Other" item enables a text input field (free-form) to let the user be more concrete. Those values are informational only, but could be added to Git User's Survey 2009, if they occur more than once. :)

Hmm, perhaps we could spam some news sites[1] on the web and keep the lists clean. Of course, this is advertising for git, too ;-)

[1] I could write something for German-speaking pro-linux.de and symlink.ch
    though I don't know if they take it as news.

Nice. That should be done again ;-)

Perhaps this is much too much, but my first thought was: 8 weeks. Hmm, perhaps 5 weeks?

This is a really nasty multiple choice question.

Perhaps yes.
The programming language list
	https://www.ohloh.net/tools
could be a start %)

- other off-line: told by friend, must be used at job, ...

Hmmm. Is this a limitation by the free web-based services or is this due to survey usability issues?

Hmm, the master/next/pu/dirty question will be a mystery to most git users that have never cared about git source code.

I wonder if this could be extended to get an idea how many people use plumbing directly or, even better, add a question like:

	Which of the following git commands or extra git tools do you use regularly?

	[list of all plumbing, porcelain and tools like stgit, guilt, etc]

or "... have you never used?", or "...have you ever used?"... Just to get an idea of what commands are often used by the users.

Perhaps it is even useful to extend that list by some behavior-changing options, like:

	[ ] git add
	[ ] git add -i / -p
	...
	[ ] git am
	[ ] git am -i
	...
	[ ] git merge
	[ ] git merge with strategy
	...
	[ ] git rebase
	[ ] git rebase -i

...though this is also handled by question 27 (see below).

Yes, this will be a long list :-) And don't forget the [ ] other :)

Of course this question could be split into
 - extra tools
 - guis (like question 17.)
 - helpers
 - porcelain
 - plumbings

Question 27. should be in this section, too:

Hmm, I'd remove "git-gui or other commit tool, gitk or other history viewer, patch management interface (e.g. StGIT)". And depending of the question I just proposed, "interactive rebase", "add --interactive [...]", "bisect" could be removed, too.

No, why should we care about the web server? :)

Hmmm, "Do you miss features in git that you know from other SCMs?" "If yes, what features are these?"

Since this is single-choice, a "don't know"/"cannot say" option should be added.

"what are it" sounds somehow funny. Is it correct? "what are them?" or "what are those?" Or "If you use some important Git feature not mentioned above, what is it?"

36. Do you think there is too few documentation on the web?
37. Do you think there is too much documentation on the web?

No ;-) Perhaps:

36. Do you think it is easy to find out how to do a specific task with
    git?

About the survey

47. Do you have any comments about the survey?
48. Should such a survey be repeated next year?
(Or: Would you take part in such a survey next year again?)
    [ ] Yes
    [ ] No, but 2010 again.
    [ ] No, never again.

Just a poor idea to get "feedback" if people like to take part in this survey or not.

Regards,
  Stephan

I'd also like to see a question about what kind of content is tracked using git.

 [ ] Source code
 [ ] Multimedia files
 [ ] LaTeX documents
 [ ] Office documents
 [ ] Configuration files
 [ ] Web content
 [ ] the whole root filesystem   ;-)
 [ ] Other: _________________

Regards.

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 03:25:03AM +0200, Jakub Narebski wrote:

IMHO, the later wording of the question is much better.

I think "friend" would be a reasonable choice here too.

I think: "What version do you use now?" and "How log do you use git?" may be more useful here. From which version may give rather confusing results because someone may "start" with 1.4 a week ago just because that is the version included in Debian Etch and after realizing that version 1.4 has serious usability issues upgraded git to 1.5. Besides, 1.5 is around for a long time now (as most as long as all previous versions), so 1.5 can mean either one month of usage or 18 months...

Dmitry

On Wed, 2008-07-23 at 18:38 +0400, Dmitry Potapov wrote:

I think these are two separate questions. In my case the first is (swiss) german, the second is english. I don't like localized software too much, I always have to think what a certain german term might mean in english to understand computing-specific texts.

That being said I think that the first question is irrelevant for the git survey. Maybe we should use the term 'internationalization' or 'localization' somewhere to make clear what we are talking about. While these terms might scare newbies away we can reasonably expect that they are known by git users.

Matthias

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 05:43:26PM +0200, Matthias Kestenholz wrote:

Wellcome to the club of those who don't like localized software :)

Exactly. That is why I said the later wording is better. I believe the implied question was what language would you like Git to talk with you.

Dmitry

On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, Dmitry Potapov wrote:

First just satisfies demographic curiosity. Second is more question about internationalization (i18n).

I'm not sure however if it is worth it, and not just simply remove this question from the survey.

Or: "word of mouth (off-line)".  Good catch, thanks.

Good idea (provided that for "How long do you use git?" there is an answer "Don't remember").

Should "What version do you use now?" be multiple choice (using git on more than one machine / operating system)? What should be possible choices for "How long do you use git?"? Perhaps.

      10. How long do you use git?
          (single choice)
       -  never/few days/few weeks/month/few months/year/few years/
          from beginning/I wrote it(*)
       +  (*) just kidding ;-)

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 11:49:41PM +0200, Jakub Narebski wrote:

I think demographic is largely covered by the first question about
country. As to i18n, I don't think it is fully covered just by the
question about one's language preference to communicate with computer
(which is probably is more correctly to call localization). Possible
questions related to i18n are:
- Do you use file names with non-ASCII characters?
- Do you use text files with non-ASCII characters?
- Do you (or members of your team) use computers with different
  character sets and have to deal with non-ASCII characters?

But I guess we do not want to have so many questions. So, maybe
something simple instead:
- Are you satisfied with support for non-ASCII characters in Git?

I think we already have another question about what OS one uses. So I believe it should be only version number here.

I would rather use numbers like that:

never less than month 1-3 months 3-6 months 6-12 months 1-2 year more than 2 years from the beginning

Dmitry

On Thu, 24 July 2008, Dmitry Potapov wrote:

But only if it is free-form question:

   xx. Are you satisfied with support for non-ASCII characters in Git?
       Yes or No?  If no, please explain what you had problems with.
       (free form, or rather Yes/No + explanation for No)

If we decide to add more questions about translating Git, I think we should also add the following:

   xx. Which parts of Git would you like/do you need translated?
       (zero or more: multiple choice)
    -  git-gui, gitk, manpages, user's manual, commands messages

One can use Git on many different machines (for example at work, and at home), or on multi-boot machine (with more than one operating system). Each of those machines, and/or each of those operating systems can use different version of Git. So that is why I think this should be multiple choice, even if I guess that most people would select only one answer.

I think it is even better; I'm not sure if we shouldn't split sub-month region, for example to provide for people who has heard of git for first time, but played with it a little bit.

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 03:25:03AM +0200, Jakub Narebski wrote:

I think many people "just use GitHub", or repo.or.cz, or Gitorious; for GitHub or Gitorious, there's even no good answer to the question above. So I would either make a separate question for these or include them in the list above.

I agree about the git-svn mention.

				Petr "Pasky" Baudis

On Wed, 23 Jul 2008, Petr Baudis wrote:

For Gitorious there is a good answer: Gitorious web interface (which is OSS, and you can deploy on your own).

Fact, I have forgot to add question about which git hosting site one uses; I have meant to add it in the second version of proposal for Git User's Survey 2008 questions list.

   xx. Which git hosting site do you use for your projects?
       (zero or more: multiple choice)
     - repo.or.cz, GitHub, Gitorious, kernel.org, freedesktop.org,
       Savannah, Assembla, Unfuddle, Alioth, Fedora Hosted, other
     + of course "if other, which"
     + should some other web hosting sites be included as well?

I'll add it, then.

Jakub Narebski wrote:

How about:  What is your preferred natural language?

Perhaps:
    With which programming languages are you proficient?

So go more general? Don't specify actual news (web)sites. Don't forge that there is a whole raft of Ruby-n-rails folks who are embracing Git these days too. They have their own whole 'nuther set of mailing lists, websites, (news) lists, etc.

Look to the history to answer this question. Did we really learn anything from the earlier surveys by this question? Maybe it would make more sense to get a feel for which general camp led them to Git? That is, did they come from the Kernel side of the world, or Ruby-on-Rails, or self-exploration, etc.

But that has to be contrasted with their _current_ notion in order to know if they make progress or not. If the difficulty persists, we're in trouble. If it is just a steep learning curve, we might be able to address that.

So maybe some variant questions like:
    How do you find it now (after some use)?
        same [very easy..very hard] scale
    How long have you been using Git?
    Rate your own Git proficiency:
        [noob, casual, I survive, everyday use,
         I answer questions from others,
         I use plumbing in scripts daily,
         Power User, Godly, I am Junio]

It's likely that most people don't know the specific answer to that question and will just guess, if anything. It is also semi-subject to time-slide as old installs are made on different distributions [*cough*] Debian. I think the question "How long have you been using Git?" Might be more easily answered and show better data. (Adoption curve.)

What?  No SCCS?

s/it was/was it/

That's a bit vague... First, maybe they didn't choose Git. Maybe they are on a project where it was mandated. So, Why did they choose Git for _what_?

Are we trying to ask "Why did you decide to use Git?" ?

Presuming they do... :-)  So, maybe add:

    I enjoy using Git:           [-5 .. 0 .. +5]
    Git satisfies my use cases:  [-5 .. 0 .. +5]
    I prefer Git over CVS/SVN:   [-5 .. 0 .. +5]

Or so...

But there are other uses too. I use it for personal crap like my Brewing Log. Sure, it is an "unpaid project", but that's not very useful information. Maybe it would make sense to expand this question into, say, 10 choices that we feel are likely uses cases and see what the actual demographics are. That is, the two-part-with-waffle isn't that informative.

Maybe:
     I use Git for: [check all that apply]
         Work projects
         Personal data
         Unpaid Open Source Development
         Sharing Data with my Niece
         Maintaining my Website
         Backending my Blog
etc.

My point here is that we can learn what Git is being used for, and ....

    Although for some reason I can't yet, I would
    really like to use Git for:
        My Wordpress backend
        Maintaining my {pr0n,mp3} Collection
        Work projects
        Sharing data with my boss
etc.

That would give us a sense of direction possibly. It might provide a notion as to what people are wanting to do, but for some reason find it hard to pull off. That is, help us identify use-cases that are being limited but would otherwise be adoptive.

Probably not.  Most people might not even know.

Hmmm.  See some ramblings of mine above too... :-)

More fine detail needed there? To help identify what people think have improved and what has not yet improved?

Since you started using Git, rate how the following
functional areas have/have-not improved:
    The User Interface          [-5 .. 0 .. +5]
    The command line interface  [-5 .. 0 .. +5]
    The intuitive behavior      [-5 .. 0 .. +5]
    The overall experience
    The behavior of 'fetch'
    The behavior of "git log'
    The config file
etc.

A -5 means it still sucks or got worse, 0 is neutral or no opinion, and +5 means it rocks or got better. This would give us direct feedback indicating if we, as a whole, are headed in the right direction with our development efforts. It will also directly tell us which features people find still suck.

We should attempt to get direct feedback on many Git features.

If "no", why not?  [Wikis suck, I don't know the answers, no time...]

Confusing.

s/commerical/commercial/

    I find the mailing list traffic level to be:
        [too low, OK, just right, tolerable, intolerable,
        a bit high, absurdly high]

I've got to ... ramble on, jdl

On Thu, 24 July 2008, Jon Loeliger wrote:

Perhaps it is a better formulation. I am not native English speaker. (But so would be some people who would answer this survey).

The problem with this question is that people does not understand it, and either do not answer or answer for example with computer language (C, Perl, or something like that). For 2007 survey, when the question was formulated as "02. What is your preferred non-programming language?" there were 37 invalid responses (computer language), and 4 "not understand" responses out of 662 people who answered this question.

On of the goals (besides curiosity about demographics) of this question is to get to know if Git core should provide infrastructure for translating messages, in addition to what already exists for git-gui and gitk. But as currently there are no other questions about l10n and i18n perhaps it would be better to simply remove this question.

Again: I am not native English speaker.

I didn't mean here enumerating actual news (web)sites, but to provide examples.

That is what I think we want to find through this question. Unfortunately I have found about Git by reading KernelTraffic and later KernelTrap during the whole "BitKeeper fiasco"; I have next to no idea about how other people have heard about Git. Help!?

There is other side to this question, _if_ we were some company, or/and 
_if_ we were concerned about making Git more popular, namely to 
identify the paces where "advertising" would make most impact.
 

The question is here to either dispel the myth that Git is hard to learn, or find that we have steep learning curve and that we should perhaps do something about it.

Good idea about question about Git proficiency.

True. I think "How long have you been using Git?" with log-like multiple choice scale: few days/few weeks/month/few months/year/few years would be better idea.

On the other hand knowing which version someone started his/her "Git adventure" would help to find probable causes where some of ideas about git were already corrected in later versions...

It would be next (additional) question, probably multiple choice, and 
easy to check out with "git version" or "git --version" command. 
 

Hmmm... SCCS got 18 out of 654 responses, only one less than SVK. I'd add it to the list of choices for this question, then.

Yes, that was I wanted to ask. "Why do you use Git? (if you do use it)".

I'm not sure if it wouldn't be more interesting to have free-form here. I think we would get quite a number of unique and non-obvious answers.

Besides the above form depends on survey site to be able to create such matrix of responses...

Very good idea. This way we can share this question with question about kind of data one uses Git for.

By the way, perhaps we should split "Work projects" into "Work projects"
and "Work projects (private git)" to distinguish between cases where Git 
is used at work, and where you use Git privately (for example via 
git-svn, or git-p4) to interact with other SCM that is used at work.
 

Hmmmm...

I can agree with that.

On the other hand the purpose of this question was to get a list of most popular servers to put example configuration for hosting git repositories via HTTP(S) protocol, and for setting up gitweb.

What ramblings were they?

The list of possible answers should (just in case, because you can simply not answer this question, although some would not know this) also "I don't know, I didn't use Git for a year".

This of course depends on web survey site allowing such feature in survey.

The trouble of course would be with coming up with the "laundry list" of 
features people did or can have a problem with.
 

Good idea.  

[We have a wiki???] ;-)
 

I think it would fall in "somewhat" category I think.

Good idea of expanding the list of answers, otherwise it is hard to 
answer this question.  Although perceived signal to noise ratio might 
be more important than bare traffic.
 

:-DDDDD

According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language), "natural language" could include, for example, bee dances. "...a language that is spoken, written, or signed by animals for general-purpose communication..." And, it might also exclude constructed languages like Esperanto and Klingon. How about:

02. What language do you prefer to use when communicating with people?

In case there are, for example, any Klingons, sentient machines, etc.,
in the audience, the sentence does not assume the answerer is human...
 :-)  It's a tricky question to write.

I'm a total newbie here, by the way.

01. USA
02. Probably best I stick to English, but I'm willing to negotiate.
06. Not sure yet.
09. Last month.  I think.

On Thu, 24 Jul 2008, Lachele Foley wrote:

Errr... this email is _not_ a survey. It is an RFC, Request For Comments, meant to come up with a good list of questions, and good list of possible answers for single choice/multiple choice questions.

On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 03:25:03AM +0200, Jakub Narebski wrote:

If the start of this survey can be timed to release 1.6.0 then the announce about Git 1.6.0 release may also contain reference to that survey, and because release announcements are usually widely distributed by online magazines such as LinuxToday and LWN, anyone who is interested in Git will learn about this survey too.

Dmitry

On Thu, 24 Jul 2008, Dmitry Potapov wrote:

You can send a story to LWN with two weeks notice; IIRC Git user's Survey 2007 was announced in LWN around the middle of its duration. I don't know about LinuxToday / Linux.com.

IIRC tentative date for 1.6.0 release is around August 10. It is quite a bit of time from now. On the other hand that mean lot of time to prepare questions, and to put survey on the web.

P.S. <tongue in cheek> are there enough of us to Digg / Mixx / Reddit Git User's Survey 2008 announcement? ;-P </tongue in cheek>

I will be AFK for about a week, so I don't think I'd have Git User's Survey 2008 ready for 1.6.0 (August 10).

This is second revision (version) of proposed questions for Git User's Survey 2008.

First, it was decided that it would be web based survey; I would use survs.com (new, in beta), unless free version expires or acquires unbearable restrictions (like no more than 10 questions, no more than 100 replies some survey sites have for non-paid accounts), because it has some nice features, and allows export of results to CSV format for further analysis... but I have not checked if the site that was used for earlier, 2006 and 2007 surveys (http://www.survey.net.nz) doesn't have those features now (it didn't have when 2007 survey was run).

Note that new features like "matrix" questions and ability to have 'other' selection for single choice and multiple choice questions affect a bit form of this survey.

Second, what questions should be put in the survey, and in the case of single choice and multiple choice questions what possible answers should be? I'd rather avoid free-form questions, even if they are more interesting, as they are PITA to analyze and summarize, especially to create some kind of histogram from free-form replies data (some of 2007 free-form responses are not fully summarized even now). Below there are proposals for questions for this year survey. Please comment on them.

By the way, should the survey be divided in pages, or simply use headers to divide survey into sections?

Third, where to send survey to / where to publish information about the survey? Last year the announcement was send to git mailing list, to LKML (Linux kernel mailing list), and mailing list for git projects found on GitProjects page on GIT wiki. Now that the number of projects using Git as version control system has grown, I don't think it would be good idea to "spam" all those mailing list; and if we don't send notice to all other projects I'm not sure if we should include LKML.

Last year survey announcement was put on Git Homepage (thanks Pasky), and on front page of Git Wiki; info about survey was also put on two git hosting sites: kernel.org and repo.or.cz. It would be nice if it was possible to put announcement about Git User's Survey 2008 at front pages of other Git hosting sites, like GitHub (one of most popular, I think), Gitorious, Freedesktop.org. If you know some other popular Git hosting sites, and even better if you know who to contact about putting survey announcement, please write. Is there some channel that I have forgot about? Should info/announcement about Git User's Survey 2008 be sent also to one of on-line magazines like LinuxToday or LWN, or asked to put on some blog? I'll add it as journal entry for #git on Ohloh, and try to make it so it would appear in "News" section for Ohloh project page for Git: http://www.ohloh.net/projects/git.

Survs.com has nice feature of "channels", which allow to count responses sent via different means separately; I am using it to publish URL for 'test' channel - answers from this channel won't be counted AT ALL!!!

Fourth, how long should the survey last? When sending announcement we should say where notice about Git User's Survey 2008 should be taken down. Last year the survey was meant to take three weeks, but was up longer. I'm thinking about having it last a month, or a month and a half, starting from September 1.

Below there is second version of announcement email (I should probably come up also with boilerplate announcement for web pages), and second version of this year round of questions. Comments are prefixed by '+', and would not necessary be included in the survey text.

Questions which were reworked are included in square brackets '[...]', while old version of answers or comments are prefixed with '!'.

BTW should this survey be divided into pages or not (if it will be on Survs.com, as it is now)?

---- Hi all,

We would like to ask you a few questions about your use of the Git version control system. This survey is mainly to understand who is using Git, how and why.

The results will be published to the Git wiki and discussed on the git mailing list.

We'll close the survey in <duration> starting from today, <date>.

Please devote a few minutes of your time to fill this simple questionnaire, it will help a lot the git community to understand your needs, what you like of git, and of course what you don't like of it.

The survey can be found here:
  http://www.survs.com/survey?id=M3PIVU72&channel=9XYYGHJ77G

(this is temporary channel URL; responses to this URL would be, I guess, discarded). ---- About you

   xx. What country are you in?
       (free form; it would be nice to have pre-filled pull-down
        menu, i.e. select form.  Survs.com doesn't support it, yet)
   xx. How old are you (in years)?
       (free form, integer)
   xx. Which programming languages you are proficient with?
       (zero or more: multiple choice)
     - C, shell, Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk, C++, C#, Java, PHP,
       Ruby, Emacs Lisp, Common Lisp or Scheme, Visual Basic,
       Delphi, Assembly, other (please specify), I am not programmer
     ! C, shell, Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk
     + First version included only programming languages used
       by git, and some from contrib area

Getting started with GIT

   xx. How did you hear about Git?
       (single choice?, in 2007 it was free-form)
     - Linux kernel news (LKML, LWN, KernelTrap, KernelTraffic,...),
       news site or magazine, blog entry, some project uses it,
       presentation or seminar (real life, not on-line), SCM research,
       IRC, mailing list, told by friend, word of mouth (off-line),
       other Internet, must be used at job, other off-line, other(*)
     + the problem is with having not very long list (not too many
       choices), but spanning all possibilities.
     + is this question interesting/important to have in survey?
   xx. Did you find GIT easy to learn?
     - very easy/easy/reasonably/hard/very hard
   xx. What helped you most in learning to use it?
       (free form question)
   xx. What did you find hardest in learning Git?
       What did you find hardest in using Git?
       (free form question)
   xx. Which Git version(s) are you using?
       (zero or more, multiple choice:
        one can use different versions on different machines)
     - pre 1.3, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6, master, next
     + might be important when checking "what did you find hardest" etc.
     + perhaps we should ask in addition to this question, or in place
       of this question (replacing it) what git version one uses; it
       should be multiple choice, and allow 'master', 'next', 'pu',
       'dirty (with own modifications)' versions in addition.
   xx. How long do you use Git?
     - never/less than month/1-3 months/3-6 months/6-12 months/
       1-2 year/more than 2 years/from the beginning
     ! never/few days/few weeks/month/few months/year/few years/
       from beginning/I wrote it(*)
     + (*) just kidding ;-)
   xx. Does git.git repository include code produced by you?
     - yes/no

Other SCMs (shortened compared with 2007 survey)

   xx. What other SCM did or do you use?
     ! (zero or more: multiple choice)
       (matrix with the following columns: never/used it/still use)
     - SCCS, RCS, CVS, Subversion, Arch or clone (ArX, tla, ...),
       Bazaar-NG, Darcs, Mercurial, Monotone, SVK, AccuRev, Perforce,
       BitKeeper, ClearCase, MS Visual Source Safe, MS Visual Studio
       Team System, PVCS, custom, other (please specify)
   xx. Why did you choose/use Git? (if you use Git)
       What do you like about using Git?
       (free form, not to be tabulated)
   xx. Why did you choose/use other SCMs? (if you use other SCMs)
       What do you like about using other SCMs?
       Note: please write name of SCMs you are talking about.
       (free form, not to be tabulated).
   xx. Do you miss features in git that you know from other SCMs?
       If yes, what features are these (and from which SCM)?
       (free form, not to be tabulated).
     + suggested by Stephan Beyer

How you use Git

  [xx. Do you use Git for work, unpaid projects, or both?
       (single choice)
     - work/unpaid projects/both]
   xx. I use Git for (check all that apply):
     - work projects, unpaid projects, proprietary code development,
       OSS development, private (unpublished) development, personal data,
       documents, website or web app, sharing data, backup, 
       wiki/blog backend, frontend to other SCM (git-svn, git-p4),
       other (if interesting)
     + Answers above are not orthogonal, neither exclusive.
       More than one answer can apply even for single repository.
   xx. How do you obtain Git?
     - binary package/source package or source script(*)/
       source tarball/pull from main repository
       (*) this includes source based distributions like Gentoo
     + added new option: source package or source script
     + should this be multiple choice?
   xx. What operating system do you use Git on?
       (one or more: multiple choice, as one can use more than one OS)
     - Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, MacOS X (Darwin),
       UnixWare, SCO SV, SunOS, Solaris, AIX, IRIX, HP-UX, Other Unix,
       MS Window/Cygwin, MS Windows/msysGit (MINGW), MS Windows/unknown,
       Other (please specify).
     ! Linux, *BSD (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.), MS Windows/Cygwin,
       MS Windows/msysGit, MacOS X, other UNIX, other
     + I have added here all the operating systems explicitly
       specified in "guessing configuration" part of Makefile
     + You can use 'uname' to get the name of operating system on Unices.
   xx. What hardware platforms do you use GIT on?
       (one or more: multiple choice, as one can use more than one machine)
     - 32bit, 64bit, handheld/portable, other (please specify)
     + It is much simplified compared to previous version, and it is
       not a free-form question.  Still not sure if even in such
       simplified form this question is to stay, or should it be removed.
   xx. What editor, IDE or RAD you use working with GIT?
       (zero/one or more: multiple choice with 'other')
     - Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ IDEA, Visual Studio, KDevelop, Anjuta,
       XCode, PIDA, Eric, Dreamweaver, Emacs, Vim, TextMate, Notepad++,
       other (please specify)
     + What choices should be in the list of editors and IDE;
       or should perhaps this question be free-form?
   xx. Which porcelains / interfaces / implementations do you use?
       (zero or more: multiple choice)
     - core-git, Cogito (deprecated), StGIT, Guilt, pg (deprecated),
       TopGit, Pyrite, Easy Git, IsiSetup, jgit, my own scripts,
       other (please specify)
   xx. Which git GUI (commit tool or history viewer, or both) do you use
       (zero or more: multiple choice)
     - CLI, gitk, git-gui, qgit, gitview, giggle, tig, instaweb,
       (h)gct, qct, KGit, git-cola / ugit, GitNub, Pyrite, git.el,
       other (please specify)
   xx. Which (main) git web interface do you use for your projects?
       (zero or more: multiple choice)
     - gitweb, cgit, wit (Ruby), git-php, viewgit (PHP), Gitorious,
       other (please specify)
   xx. Which git hosting site do you use for your projects?
       (zero or more: multiple choice)
     - repo.or.cz, GitHub, Gitorious, kernel.org, freedesktop.org,
       Savannah, Assembla, Unfuddle, Alioth, Fedora Hosted, other
     + of course "if other, which"
     + should some other web hosting sites be included as well?
   xx. How do you publish/propagate your changes?
       (zero or more: multiple choice)
     - push, pull request, format-patch + email, bundle,
       git-svn, foreign SCM (not via git-svn),
       other (see also below)
   xx. If the way you publish your changes is not mentioned above, how
       do you publish your changes?  Please explain.
       (free form, either input field or textarea)
   xx. How often do you use the following forms of git commands or extra
       git tools?
       (matrix form: never/rare/often)
        . git add -i / -p
	. git add -u
        . git am
        . git am -i
	. git apply
        . git archive
        . git bisect
	. git bisect run <cmd>
	. git bisect replay <logfile>
	. git annotate
        . git gui blame
	. git blame
	. git blame -L <start>,<end>
	. git blame -S <revs-file>
        . git bundle
	. git cherry
        . git cherry-pick
        . git cherry-pick -n
        . git citool
        . git clean
        . git commit
        . git commit -a
        . git commit <file>...
	. git commit -i <file>...
	. git commit --amend
	. git count-objects
	. git cvsexportcommit
	. git cvsserver
	. git ... --dirstat
        . git fetch <options>
	. git filter-branch
	. git format-patch
	. git fsck
        . git grep
	. git imap-send
	. git instaweb
        . git log --grep/--author/...
	. git log -S<string>
	. git log --graph
        . git merge
        . git merge with strategy
        . git merge --squash
	. git mergetool
        . git pull
	. git pull <remote>
	. git pull <URL> <ref>
        . git push
	. git relink
        . git rebase
        . git rebase -i
	. git rebase --onto
	. git remote add <name> <URL>
	. git remote show <name>
	. git remote prune <name>
	. git remote update
	. git request-pull
        . git reset --soft
	. git reset [--mixed]
	. git reset --hard
	. git revert
	. git send-email
	. git show-branch
	. git shortlog
	. git shortlog -s
	. git stash
	. git submodule
	. git svn
	. git tag
	. git tag -a/-s
	. git tag -v
	. git whatchanged
        . git gui
	. gitk
	. gitprompt
     + (*)rarely is to mean: a few times, or sometimes (from time to time)
     + the list does not include commands which you _have_ to use,
       like "git add <file>", "git init"/"git clone" etc. 
     + in what order should be those commands; currently they are in
       alphabetical order?
   xx. Which of the following features do you use?
       (zero or more: multiple choice)
     - git-gui or other commit tool, gitk or other history viewer, patch
       management interface (e.g. StGIT), bundle, eol conversion (crlf),
       gitattributes, submodules, separate worktree, reflog, stash,
       shallow clone, detaching HEAD, mergetool, interactive rebase,
       add --interactive or other partial commit helper, commit
       templates, bisect, working with dirty tree, integration with
       IDE/editor, other (not mentioned here)
     + should probably be sorted in some resemblance of order
     + are there any new features which should be listed here?
   xx. Which features do you find unique and useful ones, compared
       to other systems (other SCMs)?
       (zero or more: multiple choice)
     - [same set as in above question, or almost the same set]
   xx. If you use some important Git features not mentioned above,
       what are those?
       (free form, textarea)
       

What you think of Git

   xx. Overall, how happy are you with Git?
       (single choice)
     - unhappy/not so happy/happy/very happy/completely ecstatic
   xx. How does Git compare to other SCM tools you have used?
       (single choice)
     - worse/equal (or comparable)/better
   xx. What would you most like to see improved about Git?
       (features, bugs, plug-ins, documentation, ...)
   xx. What tools would you like to see Git support in?
       (free form)

Changes in Git (since year ago, or since you started using it)

   xx. Did you participate in previous Git User's Surveys?
       (zero or more, multiple choice)
     - 2006, 2007
   xx. How do you compare current version with version from year ago?
     - current version is: better/worse/no changes/cannot say

Documentation

   xx. Do you use the Git wiki?
    -  yes/no
   xx. Do you find Git wiki useful?
    -  yes/no/somewhat
   xx. Do you contribute to Git wiki?
    -  yes/no/only corrections or spam removal
   xx. Do you find Git's on-line help (homepage, documentation) useful?
    -  yes/no/somewhat
   xx. Do you find help distributed with Git useful
       (manpages, manual, tutorial, HOWTO, release notes)?
    -  yes/no/somewhat
   xx. What could be improved on the Git homepage?
       (free form)
   xx. What could be improved in Git documentation?
       (free form)

Translating Git

   xx. What is your preferred non-programming language?
  (or) What is the language you want computer communicate with you?
   xx. What do you need/want to have translated?
       (zero or more, multiple choice)
     - commands messages, manpages, manual & tutorial etc.,
       technical documentation, HOWTOs, git homepage, git wiki,
       git-gui/gitk, subcommands and long option names

Getting help, staying in touch

   xx. Have you tried to get Git help from other people?
    -  yes/no
   xx. What channel did you use to request help?
       (zero or more: multiple choice)
    -  git mailing list, git users group, IRC, blog post, 
       asking git guru/colleague, other
    +  This is one question which doesn't need, I think, explanation
       of "other" choice
   xx. If yes, did you get these problems resolved quickly
       and to your liking?
    -  yes/no
   xx. Would commercial (paid) support from a support vendor
       be of interest to you/your organization?
    -  yes/no/not applicable
   xx. Do you think it is easy to find out how to do a specific task
       with git?
    -  yes/no/not always
   xx. Do you read the mailing list?
       (multiple choice: zero or more; "none" is just in case)
    -  none/git@vger.kernel.org/Git For Human Beings/msysGit
   xx. If yes, do you find it useful?
    -  yes/no/somewhat (optional)
  [xx. Do you find traffic levels on Git mailing list OK.
    -  yes/no? (optional)]
   xx. Do you find the mailing list traffic level to be:
    -  too low/OK/just right/tolerable/intolerable/
       a bit high/absurdly high/I don't read it
   xx. Do you use the IRC channel (#git on irc.freenode.net)?
    -  yes/no
   xx. If yes, do you find IRC channel useful?
    -  yes/no/somewhat (optional)
   xx. Did you have problems getting GIT help on mailing list or
       on IRC channel? What were it? What could be improved?
       (free form)

Open forum

   xx. What other comments or suggestions do you have that are not
       covered by the questions above?
       (free form)
   xx. Should such a survey be repeated next year?
    -  yes/no/no opinion

2008/8/20 Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>:

"Which programming languages ARE you proficient with?"

or maybe simplier

"What programming languages do you use?"

Some time back there was a script posted on this list which extracted this statistics from users .bash_history. Maybe reference it here?

The meanings of "unique" and "useful" are unrelated, maybe make this two separate questions?

"What, in your opinion important, Git feature it is not mentioned above?"

you can drop "most": if people think something should be improved, we (most) likely want to know about it :)

"What tools (IDE, RAD, editors) would you like to support Git?"

What they (the problems, plural) were?

On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 01:34:39PM +0200, Alex Riesen wrote:

Isn't this question more general, like covering also bugtrackers, automated testing tools and whatnot?

				Petr "Pasky" Baudis

Dnia środa 20. sierpnia 2008 14:04, Petr Baudis napisał:

Currently it is:
   xx. What tools (or kind of tools) would you like to see Git support in?
       (e.g. IDE, RAD, editors, continuous integration, software hosting,
        bugtracker, merge tool,...)
       (free form)

BTW I think that it should be "Git support in", not "to support Git". But I am not a native English speaker.

2008/8/20 Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com>:

"to see Git support in them" then?

Well, who is here? :)

Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> writes:

Very nicely done.

I'd say this is more interesting than "what programming language do you speak".

This is a very good idea. "What is hardest" grouped by "How proficient are you with git".

"Plan to use"?

With this number of "other systems", it is easier to pick if they are sorted alphabetically.

You have reworded this question on the site but it has typo "Unless of cours you are hosting..." (s/cours y/course y/).

cvsexportcommit?

"never, rarely, *sometimes*, often"?

"apply --whitespace=fix"?

"git daemon" and "git daemon (pushing enabled)" as separate items.

"diff --check"?

"pull --rebase"?

Separate "(empty) vs <remote> vs <URL> <refspec>" entries for "git push"? Also for "git fetch"?

"git stash pop"? "git stash save --keep-index"?

That is the most sensible.

If you single out "eol conversion", perhaps separate "whitespace attributes" out of generic "gitattributes"?

s/separate worktree/& (git-new-workdir)/;

"What can/will you do to help improve them?"?

LOL on the last one ;-)  Please keep it --- we may find amusing results.

You have "IRC (#git)".  Perhaps a separate item "IRC (#github)"?

"Such a", meaning "This"?

On Wed, 20 Aug 2008, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Thanks

Perhaps.

I've had some trouble with coming with a list of answers, because I wanted to have as few free-form questions as possible.

Errr... I didn't add "How proficient are you with git?" question to Git User's Survey 2008, but I think I would.

Hmmm...

There is some order to this... and as there is, as far as I can see, easy way to reorder _answers_ in a question on Survs (as opposed to reordering questions), I think I would keep it in current (dis)order.

It is currently on Survs

  xx. Which git web interface do you use for your projects/have installed?
      (Web interfaces used by git hosting sites do not count)

Thanks, corrected.

This I think fits in "foreign SCM"; well, git-svn is also "foreign SCM", but as it seems most popular I kept it separate.

My idea was to have minimal number of possible choices, to make it easier on the responder to select appropriate answer. 'Never' is I think obvious, 'often' was to meant that it is incorporated in one's workflow, and 'rare' is in between. Nevertheless I guess that having four columns doesn't make it that much harder.

Changed.

Done.

Done.

Hmmm... does anybody have it as part of his/her workflow? What I mean is to ask if there is anybody for whom the answer would be 'often'.

Currently not added, but it can be.

Good catch. Added.

I'm not sure if distinguish between "git pull" and "git pull <remote>", and I'd rather limit number of possible responses. Note that "git pull <URL> <ref>" works *differently*, as it doesn't use remote-tracking branch.

Added the second one.  Good catch, thanks.
 

I was thinking about dividing them line on git(1) manpage; this would be useful in dealing with 50-replies limit on Survs (it would be nice to have it explicitly mentioned somewhere), which made it a bit harder to add new suggestions.

eol conversion is not only attributes, but also two config variables
(core.autocrlf and core.safecrlf).
 

Or core.worktree.

Good idea.  I have added this, separately for each question...

...but now I'm not sure if not remove it.

Yeah, that was me making with the funny. "git Eintragen", anyone?

Good catch. If we are separating git mailing list and user's group (Google Group) it would be nice to distinguish IRC channels.

Added.

Yes.  Now it reads:

  58. Should Git User's Survey be repeated next year?

Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> writes:

I meant that "how long have you been using" already has a strong correlation to the proficiency (iow I did not mean to suggest adding a new question).

As I personally do not think there is any sane usecase that *must* use core.worktree and/or GIT_WORK_TREE, I took "separate worktree" as "having two or more worktree on the same repository via new-workdir mechanism", but you meant core.worktree. It shows the question is ill-stated that there are confusion even between us.

Wouldn't that be an overkill?

On Thu, 21 Aug 2008, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Well, it is here...

Actually I meant here ability to work with worktree which doesn't have repository embedded into it, in '.git' directory in top directory of the worktree.

The ability to work with multiple worktrees requires this, but separate worktree is slightly broader feature. I have added however new "multiple worktrees (git-new-worktree)" option (answer).

But this reminded me that I forgot to add 'alternates' to the lists...

This is now slightly reworked at Survs.com.

Hi,

Jakub Narebski wrote:

Great!

Divided pages have a psychological impact, they don't look much and you can say "Almost there!" on each page.

But headers and one-page surveys have a big advantage for users that pay for Internet access per time unit: they can go offline, answer the questions, and go online again to submit the survey.

So I've scrolled across your test survey on survs.com and I think it should be kept on one page. Looks nice and manageable.

This question leads me to a question that could be put into the survey:

	Where have you read about this survey? (optional)
	[Free form]

And lasting until 2008-10-10?  No, I do not really care.

So, some comments on the questions now:

"What country do you live in?" perhaps?

There is a typo on survs.com (hear_d_). Should this by the way be multiple choice? I have heard about Git several times before I tried it.

I will only quote from survs.com now:

                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ? :) I think this should be removed

custom?

Uh, this is ambiguous. Is this our git or some script on top of git? In both cases, this should be clarified.

[...]

             ^^^^^^^^                                      ^
	     typo, but I'd rather do s/of cours //   and s/$/./ :-)

                                     | Not yet, but sounds cool   ;-)

No no :-)

But I wonder if we could split the "Never" case into several cases with
reasons like:
 - Do not know.
 - Not yet needed.
 - Other (did not understand; tried but did not work; ...)

But this will perhaps bloat the question even more, so we should keep "Never", though I think the reasons could be interesting. Could some "Comments" field for question 26 help?

Some other comment: I dislike that there is *one* "Reset" button for such matrix questions. But I guess you cannot change that?

I think many of the possible replies have been used in several other
questions before, e.g. in 
 - 21. (gitk, git gui), 
 - 24. (git bundle),
 - 26/27. (git gui, gitk, git stash)
 - ...

But this question still seems to makes sense for:
 [ ] eol conversion (crlf)
 [ ] gitattributes
 [ ] reflog (ref@{23})
 [ ] shallow clone
 [ ] detaching HEAD   <- I think several people could have used that without knowing
 [ ] commit templates
 [ ] integration with IDE/editor
 [ ] non-default hooks

And btw:

Big thanks for your efforts,
  Stephan

Hi,

I have btw submitted on survs.com and it didn't say something like "Thank you blablalba We have received your survey. / Your survey was saved." or something like that. It just put me to their "COMING SOON" front page. Confusing behavior.

Is there some way to change that without writing an e-mail to survs.com admins? ;-)

Regards,
  Stephan

On Wed, 20 Aug 2008, Stephan Beyer wrote:

I also prefer single page surveys; it would be better if this survey
was shorter (by the way, how long did you took to complete test survey?),
but there are so many interesting questions...
 

But where to add it? Additionally I'd rather limit free-form questions to absolute minimum.

This is the question I was lacking, so I'll think about adding it to the survey.

This is better phrasing.  Changed.
 

 
Good idea, I think, and doesn't lead to more work when analysing.
And it would perhaps make it easier to choose appropriate answer.

Changed. 

O.K.

I mean here custom, not published (or no longer existing) SCM; something that would be hard to write about.

I agree that it is not the best phrasing.

There is "my own scripts" at the bottom; I mean here using no additional porcelain, no interface on top of git command line.

But it is here for completeness only; however if you have some good explanation for "core-git" option I can put it below this question.

Thanks.  Done.

Now it is 'never/rarely/sometimes/often'. I think there are enough free form questions that one can put his/her own comments about git commands in this survey...

Yes, this is canned web survey site. I can only send feedback, but I guess so can you (unless this requires subscription/invite...).

This is distinguishing feature. What I mean here that you can use "git add" and "git commit" (not "git commit -a") and have some uncommitted changes, like for example change of version in Makefile.

You are welcome.

Hi,

Jakub Narebski wrote:

[...]

Yes, there are, but I think the length is ok and all questions are optional (should this be mentioned somewhere?), right? So there should be no problem.

I filled in some stuff here and there and submitted, but I didn't actually complete the survey. But I'd say it's manageable within 10 minutes.

If you want to add it nonetheless, then it could be question 60.

This means the difference to "other" is that it is something somebody has written for herself (or a company product only used in that company) and "other" is some less popular but public SCM?

I see you've changed it to "custom (non published)". There is a typo: s/non /non-/ ;)

Btw I wonder if people that are very new to git (perhaps started using it in 1.6.0) will not know the "SCM" abbreviation. But the possible choices should make it clear. (And if not, "Never" to everything will be the right choice.)

So just pure, naked git? The real git[tm]^H^H^H^H? ;-) Ok, if I had not asked, I wouldn't have checked this option.

I think it should be rephrased by "git" or "git (pure)" or "git (core)". But "core-git" really looks like another tool to me.

Now it is:

            ^         ^                                     ^
I like punctuation:
  (*) Unless, of course, you are hosting some git hosting site.

*nitpick* :-)

No comment here? ;-)

When replying to this question I really felt like having answered all that before.

Sounds like "Taking advantage of using the index". (Yesterday/today/tomorrow I am using SVN in university and I wished so much that I had some git or at least git-svn[1] just because of the *index*.)

OT Footnote [1]:
 I tried to install git (and git-svn) into $HOME/root ($HOME/root/bin is
 in PATH), but git-svn needs Perl bindings to SVN and they're pain to
 install into $HOME/root from source, because it is in the subversion
 source, and that needs a lot of Apache stuff and other things.
 So does anybody own a quick guide how to get that working without having
 to compile subversion from source (and without having root access, of
 course)?  ... (Some version of subversion is installed, but not the 
 perl modules. Just copying the .pm files did not seem to work.)

Ok, this is "working with dirty tree", but I nonetheless wonder if this is really a feature.

Another general comment: Multiple choice question have the disadvantage that we cannot distinguish "None" and skipped questions. So if this is an issue, I wonder if adding a "None of the above" choice could help. But perhaps this is no issue and can be ignored.

Regards,
  Stephan

Stephan Beyer wrote:

I'll added it. It would be useful if there would be survey in the following years.

Yes.

Thanks, corrected and added explanation below the question.
 
[...]

Done.

Done.

They _are_ different questions; yes, some answers repeat themselves because I tried each question to be self-contained, if possible, so it should be easy to skip some question and still have full value in the rest of questions.

Hmmm... reading the above I have thought about adding "incremental committing" to the list of features; I mean here the workflow of "<edit>; git add; git diff/git diff --cached; <edit>; git add; commit"

But I think I'll just add "the index" to question

  30. Which features do you find unique and/or useful ones,
      compared to other systems (other SCMs)?

and leave the rest for free-form question 31. following it: "If you use some important Git features not mentioned above, what are those?".

Hmmmm....

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 7:08 PM, Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:

[snip]

Please include an "others" selection that will except a comma list of languages. I'm an FPGA designer and use Verilog and VHDL but I know they wouldn't be a common choice.

Mike

Hi again,

...

I wonder if people who do not know about master/next being git.git branches may do "[X] next" because they think they will use the next version available.

So could you write "master branch of official git repository" and the same for "next"?

...

Better:
 "custom (non-published)" means a version control system which has
 not been released to the public, for example, something written for
 yourself or your company only.

And I am unsure if "SCM" is better than "version control system" in this sentence, but I do not think this is really important.

...

                                           ^^^^^^^^^ "even for a"

...

            ^^^^ from

"pre-compiled binary (e.g. from rpm or deb archives)"

Right? I think naming two popular package formats of distributors should people help to get the point.

I still dislike that there are a lot of choices that generate redundancy to other questions. On the other hand, scientific surveys always contain (hidden) redundancy to ensure that the test person gives sane answers.

I wonder if the "no opinion" choice is not needed because there is the "Reset" button.

Apropos!

Is it possible to add a header text?

I'd like that there are three things being clarified at the beginning of the survey page:

 * The survey is anonymous, but all information that the users provide will
   be publicly available on the wiki.

 * The users may skip questions as they like.

 * The user needs JavaScript to submit the survey.

I btw do not like the last fact, but since most users nowadays have JavaScript activated, it may not be that bad.

Also, I still do not get a succesful message after submitting, but that may be related to the channel (test), if you have configured it like that. Have you? ;)

Regards,
  Stephan

On Sun, 24 Aug 2008, Stephan Beyer napisał:

Thanks. I've added this.

Thank you, that is much better.

Hmmm...

Corrected. Thanks.

Corrected. Thanks.
 

Thanks, added.

It is possible.
 

Thanks for reminding this. I have added this to survey.

F**k. I didn't notice this soon enough, and now I'd rather not re-enter all 60 questions. I have sent feedback that requiring JavaScript to be able to submit survey is strange.

Survs.com came recommended here on this mailing list. I have chosen it over editing old www.survey.net.nz because it had "other (please specify)" for both single answer (radio button) and multiple choice (checkbox) question; later also because of the "matrix" questions. I didn't realize that it requires JavaScript to submit... perhaps this would get corrected before starting point for Git User's Survey 2008 (1 September, or later).

Yes, that depends on channel configuration, and I have forgot to add it for this channel.

Thanks again for checking this survey, and for your comments.

BTW. here is analysis of 'test' channel (note that some questions, and some possible answers, were added after starting 'test' channel):

  http://www.survs.com/app/4/wo/Y03N37u4Ou5p9SmoNrc5f0/0.0.33.1.1.1.1.5.1.1.0.1.1.7.11.0.1.0.13.1.1

I am author of kgit and is a dead project i don't think anyone uses it and should use it. I have amended the git wiki for the same, can you please amend the survey,

In other news i have replaced kgit with teamgit http://www.devslashzero.com/teamgit Which should be ready soon for prime time, but is not worth to be in survey since its not officially released yet.

Thanks BAIN

This is third (and hopefully last) revision of proposed questions and announcement for Git User's Survey 2008.

First, it was decided that it would be web based survey. I would use Survs.com (new, in beta); it is unlikely to change as all questions are entered there already and moving it would require quite a bit of work. It was recommended here on the list (I have received courtesy invitation; thanks a lot); I have chosen it over survey.net.nz, used for preceding 2006 (by Paolo Ciarrocchi) and 2007 (by me) surveys, because it has some nice features, and allows export of results to CSV format for further analysis.

Note that new features like "matrix" questions and ability to have 'other' selection for single choice and multiple choice questions affect a bit form of this survey. This also affect chance to move survey to different web survey site.

There are good news and bad news about choosing Survs.com. Good news is that there would be no problem of free Survs beta account expiring during running survey, or during analysis. Bad news is that submitting survey currently requires having JavaScript enabled, which was pointed out by Stephan Beyer; they are working on it, but I don't know if this issue would be corrected in time for planned duration of Git User's Survey 2008.

Second, what possible answers in the case of single answer and multiple answer questions should be? You can view current version of survey at provided survey link (see below), currently test one only. Please point typos, mistakes and errors; I am not native English speaker.

Third, where to send survey to / where to publish information about the survey? Last year the announcement was send to git mailing list, to LKML (Linux kernel mailing list), and mailing list for git projects found on GitProjects page on GIT wiki. Now that the number of projects using Git as version control system has grown, I don't think it would be good idea to "spam" all those mailing list; and if we don't send notice to all other projects I'm not sure if we should include LKML.

Last year survey announcement was put on Git Homepage (thanks Pasky), and on front page of Git Wiki; info about survey was also put on two git hosting sites: kernel.org and repo.or.cz. It would be nice if it was possible to put announcement about Git User's Survey 2008 at front pages of other Git hosting sites, like GitHub (one of most popular, I think), Gitorious, Freedesktop.org. If you know some other popular Git hosting sites, and even better if you know who to contact about putting survey announcement, please write. Is there some channel that I have forgot about? Should info/announcement about Git User's Survey 2008 be sent also to one of on-line magazines like LinuxToday or LWN, or asked to put on some blog? I'll add it as journal entry for #git on Ohloh, and try to make it so it would appear in "News" section for Ohloh project page for Git: http://www.ohloh.net/projects/git.

Survs.com has nice feature of "channels", which allow to count responses sent via different means separately; I am using it to publish URL for 'test' channel - answers from this channel won't be counted AT ALL!!!

I am thinking about asking to put annoncement about Git User's
Survey 2008 at the following places (in parenthesis there are people who 
I think can ask to put announcement about survey):
 * git.or.cz, Git Homepage (Petr 'Pasky' Baudis)
 * git-scm.com, alternate Git Homepage (Scott Chacon)
 * http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/FrontPage (it is wiki, after all)
 * #git channel subject (one of channel admins, but who?)
 * git.kernel.org (John 'Warthog9' Hawley)
 * repo.or.cz (Petr 'Pasky' Baudis)
 * gitorious.org (???)
 * github.com (???)
 * ...
What are other git hosting sites, or blogs, or other sites where to ask 
to put announcement about this survey?

Fourth, how long should the survey last? When sending announcement we should say where notice about Git User's Survey 2008 should be taken down. Last year the survey was meant to take three weeks, but was up longer. I'm thinking about having it last a month, or a month and a half, starting from September 1.

Below there is second version of announcement email (I should probably come up also with boilerplate announcement for web pages). I haven't put third version of this year round of questions, because text of survey at Survs.com and what I had written diverged, I'm sorry...

---- Hello all,

We would like to ask you a few questions about your use of the Git version control system. This survey is mainly to understand who is using Git, how and why.

The results will be published to the Git wiki and discussed on the git mailing list.

We'll close the survey in 1 month starting from today, 1 September.

Please devote a few minutes of your time to fill this simple questionnaire, it will help a lot the git community to understand your needs, what you like of git, and of course what you don't like of it.

The survey can be found here:
  http://www.survs.com/survey?id=M3PIVU72&channel=9XYYGHJ77G

(this is temporary channel URL; responses to this URL would be, I guess, discarded). ----

You can view survey results (only summary, not individual responses) at http://www.survs.com/shareResults?survey=M3PIVU72&rndm=OKJQ45LAG8

Hi,

Jakub Narebski wrote:

I still think Oct 10 (a Friday) is a good date. This is ~6 weeks - other opinions?

Ok, I've written a text that can be seen as some kind of announcement template for news on {Open Source,programming,Linux}-related news sites.

--8<-- Git User's Survey Begins

Two weeks after the major release of Git version 1.6.0, the Git community starts a survey containing 60 questions that can help to understand the users' needs, behavior, and what they like and dislike about Git.

<a href="http://git.or.cz">Git</a> is a distributed source code management system (or in other words: distributed version control system) that was initially written by Linus Torvalds for the Linux kernel development after the proprietary BitKeeper system stopped being free of charge in 2005. Quickly Git gained popularity and other Open Source projects like <a href="http://www.x.org/wiki/Development/git">X.org</a>, <a href="http://git.videolan.org/">VLC</a> or <a href="http://www.winehq.org/site/git">WINE</a> began to use it.

There have already been user surveys in <a href="http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitSurvey">2006</a> and <a href="http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitSurvey2007">2007</a>. Since then, a lot has changed.

Git users are called upon to answer the questions until Oct 10, 2008. After that date, the results can be found on the <a href="http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitSurvey2008">Git Wiki</a> in CSV format and in some evaluated form.

Link: http://www.survs.com/survey?id=M3PIVU72&channel=2WXE4BVTW8
  or: http://tinyurl.com/gitsurvey2008 (a short link, not yet generated)
  or: http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitSurvey2008
-->8--

Of course, this is open for improvements and discussion.

BTW, this is explicitly _not_ meant for Git-specific web sites. There the announcement of the last year might be sufficient, in some slightly changed form:

--8<-- <a href="...">The Git User's Survey</a> is up!

Please devote a few minutes of your time to fill this simple questionnaire. It will help the Git community to understand your needs, what you like of Git, and, of course, what you don't like of it. -->8--

Regards,
  Stephan

This is fourth (and hopefully last) revision of proposed questions and announcement for Git User's Survey 2008. This time is mainly about creating good cover (announcement) letter, and about where to announce the survey.

Survey would be at Survs.com, is spite of its deficiencies like requiring JavaScript to submit (which might get corrected before planned start of survey); it has some nice features which survey.net.nz (the site which was used for 2006 and 2007 surveys) doesn't have. Moving to other _free_ web survey site now would be difficult...

You can view current version of survey at provided survey link (see below); unfortunately proposed questions (and answers) diverged a bit from what was entered at Survs.com. It would be possible nevertheless to get current version of questions, comments, and possible answers, if required.

Questions that remains: where to send announcement about this survey, 
and what should be written in such announcement. I am thinking about 
asking to put announcement about Git User's Survey 2008 at the 
following places (in parenthesis there are people who, I think,
I can ask to put announcement about survey):
 * git.or.cz, Git Homepage (Petr 'Pasky' Baudis)
 * git-scm.com, alternate Git Homepage (Scott Chacon)
 * http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/FrontPage (it is wiki, after all)
 * #git channel subject (one of channel admins, but who?)
 * git.kernel.org (John 'Warthog9' Hawley)
 * repo.or.cz (Petr 'Pasky' Baudis)
 * gitorious.org (???)
 * github.com (???)
 * ...
What are other git hosting sites, or blogs, or other sites where to ask 
to put announcement about this survey?

Below there is new version of announcement email:
-- >8 --
To: git@vger.kernel.org, (probably other sites).
Subject: [ANNOUNCE] Git User's Survey 2008

Hello all,

We would like to ask you a few questions about your use of the Git version control system. This survey is mainly to understand who is using Git, how and why.

The results will be published to the Git wiki and discussed on the git mailing list.

The survey would be open from 1 September till 10 October.

Please devote a few minutes of your time to fill this simple questionnaire, it will help a lot the git community to understand your needs, what you like of git, and of course what you don't like of it.

The survey can be found here:
  http://www.survs.com/survey?id=M3PIVU72&channel=2WXE4BVTW8
-------
Note that above channel is currently _closed_. If you want to take
a peek at current version of the survey, use "test" channel:
  http://www.survs.com/survey?id=M3PIVU72&channel=9XYYGHJ77G
(it should be open, unless I am modifying some questions).  You can find 
summary analysis (without answers to free-form questions) at:
  http://www.survs.com/shareResults?survey=M3PIVU72&rndm=OKJQ45LAG8

 
Stephan Beyer proposed the following announcement template for news on 
{Open Source,programming,Linux}-related news sites (with some small 
modifications by me):
-- >8 --
Subject: Git User's Survey 2008 Begins

Two weeks after the major release of Git version 1.6.0, the Git community starts a survey containing 60 questions that can help to understand the users' needs, behavior, and what they like and dislike about Git.

<a href="http://git.or.cz">Git</a> is a distributed source code management system (or in other words: distributed version control system) that was initially written by Linus Torvalds for the Linux kernel development after the proprietary BitKeeper system stopped being free of charge in 2005. Quickly Git gained popularity and other Open Source projects like <a href="http://www.x.org/wiki/Development/git">X.org</a>, <a href="http://git.videolan.org/">VLC</a> or <a href="http://www.winehq.org/site/git">WINE</a> began to use it.

There have already been user surveys in <a href="http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitSurvey">2006</a> and <a href="http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitSurvey2007">2007</a>. Since then, a lot has changed.

Git users are called upon to answer the questions until Oct 10, 2008. After that date, the results can be found on the <a href="http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitSurvey2008">Git Wiki</a> in CSV format, and later in some evaluated form.

Link: http://www.survs.com/survey?id=M3PIVU72&channel=2WXE4BVTW8
  or: http://tinyurl.com/gitsurvey2008 (a short link, not yet generated)
  or: http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitSurvey2008
-- 8< --

And below there is proposed announcement to be put on git-relates sites, like Git Homepage (git.or.cz and git-scm.com), GitWiki (FrontPage), and git hosting sites (repo.or.cz, kernel.org, freedesktop.org, gitorious, github,... -- >8 -- <a href="...">The Git User's Survey</a> is up!

Please devote a few minutes of your time to fill this simple questionnaire. It will help the Git community to understand your needs, what you like of Git, and, of course, what you don't like of it. -- 8< -- What is lacking is how the request/announcement _email_ to be send to administrators of those sites would look like. Help, please?

P.S. In 2006 I think the announcement was put only on git mailing list, in 2007 beside putting it on repo.or.cz, git.kernel.org and GitWiki it was send to mailing lists (and newsgroups) for many different projects which use git for development, as SCM of choice. But the number of such projects has grown enormously. I wonder if we should send survey announcements also to individual mailing lists for different projects, like WINE, OLPC, X.Org, etc.

On Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 03:33:45AM +0200, Jakub Narebski wrote:

For github.com, you would ask Chris Wanstrath or PJ Hyett.

On Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 3:33 AM, Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Jakub!

No, in 2006 I sent the announcement to the following lists:

wine-users@winehq.org xmms2-devel@lists.xmms.org xcb@lists.freedesktop.org cairo@cairographics.org u-boot-users@lists.sourceforge.net git@vger.kernel.org linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org linux@ml.bilug.linux.it (my LUG)

Ciao,

Hello all,

   Jakub, by now you should already have received an invitation to  
join the Survs beta.

   Information about the beta is included in the email. I don't know  
if your project will go beyond the beta period and I cannot comment  
about costs right now, but rest assured we'll have very competitive  
pricing plans.

   We sincerely hope our application proves to be useful to achieve  
your goals.

   Finally thank you Jean-François for mentioning us, we really  
appreciate it.

Regards, Miguel Arroz

On 2008/07/23, at 16:14, Jean-François Veillette wrote:

http://www.survs.com

Dnia środa 23. lipca 2008 17:14, Jean-François Veillette napisał:

It certainly _looks_ nice, but it lacks one very important feature (or at least I was not able to find it): the ability to download *RAW* data to analyse it off-line using more advanced tools (like for example Perl script to clean-up responses; spreadsheet like Excel or Gnumeric, or some statictics tool like R to analyze data, for example do a correlation between responses to different questions).

http://www.survey.net.nz allows to download raw data in modified
CSV format (modified as it allows for line continuation).  See for
example raw data for Git User's Survey 2007 results:
  http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitSurvey2007?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=surveydata.csv

There is another nice thing that http://www.survey.net.nz is supposed
to have (but it doesn't unfortunately work; at least downloading
current layout of survey to tweak off-line doesn't/didn't work),
namely ability to create survey off-line using some specified text
format, and upload it, instead of creating it on-line (which might be
much work for large surveys).
 

On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 1:49 AM, Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> wrote:

I created an account myself and gave it a try. You -can- export in either an excel sheet or csv through: Surveys > [name of survey] > Analyze > Export.

As said, the same is possible at the Survs thing, even line continuations work I think. Below is an sample export of a quick survey I created and filled in myself. Looks pretty parsable to me :).

"Git Survey 2008" "Viewed",1 "Incomplete",0 "Complete",1

"Respondent Number","Date","Time","What country are you in?","What is the language you prefer git to communicate with you?","How old are you (in years)?","How did you hear about Git?","How are you doing?" "","","","","","","","" 2,"Jul 24, 08","11:06:56","Netherlands","Dutch","19","News site or magazine, Blog entry, IRC, Mailing list","Very well, thank you very much. I was hoping you would ask that question as I was trying to tell someone that this survs thing is quite nice, actually. The only downside so far is that you cannot prepare a survey offline and then upload it to the site. I'm sure that won't be a problem though."

Agreed, it would be nice to have something like this. Especially when adding a bunch of options. It doesn't seem that Survs allows you to create the Surveys offline, but if it doesn'tw ork at survey.net.nz anyway...?

On Mon, 25 Aug 2008, Stephan Beyer wrote:

I have send feedback.

The problem is not that _filling_ survey requires JavaScript, because it doesn't. The problem is that submit _link_ uses JavaScript link javascript:finishSurvey() instead of having submit _button_, which would use 'submit URL' (and optionally have onSubmit event to check response).