[RFC] GIT user survey

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From: Paolo Ciarrocchi
Date: Saturday, June 24, 2006 - 9:18 am

Hi all,
I was wondering whether it could be a good idea to have a kind of "GIT
users survey" when google pointed my eyes to this page:
http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2006-April/007513.html

So I modified the content of the survey and published a DRAF here:
http://paolo.ciarrocchi.googlepages.com/GITSurvey

Here is the content of the proposed survey:

About you

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

Getting started with GIT

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

How you use GIT

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

What you think of GIT

    1. Overall, how happy are you with GIT?
    2. How does GIT compare to other SCM tools you have used?
    3. What do you like about using GIT?
    4. What would you most like to see improved about GIT?
       (features, bugs, plugins, documentation, ...)
    5. If you want to see GIT more widely used, what do you
       think we could do to make this happen?

Documentation

    1. Do you use the GIT wiki?   If yes, do you find it useful?
    2. Do you find GIT's online help useful?
    3. What is your favourite user documentation for any software
       projects or products you have used?

Getting help, staying in touch

    1. Have you tried to get GIT help from other people?
          * If yes, did you get these problems resolved quickly and to
            your liking?
    2. Do you subscribe to the mailing ...
From: Randal L. Schwartz
Date: Saturday, June 24, 2006 - 10:05 am

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

Paolo>     1. Do you use the GIT wiki?   If yes, do you find it useful?

There's a git wiki??

-- 
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<merlyn@stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Perl/Unix/security consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See PerlTraining.Stonehenge.com for onsite and open-enrollment Perl training!
-

From: Randal L. Schwartz
Date: Saturday, June 24, 2006 - 12:54 pm

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


Paolo> Yup.
Paolo> http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/FrontPage

I think my point is that I read this list regularly, but
I had no idea there was a wiki.  Where is it being promoted?
Surely not on git(1).  Was it announced here?  How often?

-- 
Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095
<merlyn@stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
Perl/Unix/security consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
See PerlTraining.Stonehenge.com for onsite and open-enrollment Perl training!
-

From: Petr Baudis
Date: Saturday, June 24, 2006 - 1:04 pm

Dear diary, on Sat, Jun 24, 2006 at 09:54:38PM CEST, I got a letter

It was announced in

	15227   F May 03 Petr Baudis     ( 1.1K) [ANNOUNCE] Git wiki

spawning a 61-mails thread. ;-)

It is also linked from the homepage, although not as prominently as it
should be; it grew nicely over the time so it probably deserves a more
visible link now. I will add it on the front page.

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
Stuff: http://pasky.or.cz/
A person is just about as big as the things that make them angry.
-

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Saturday, June 24, 2006 - 1:52 pm

Pasky, the homepage seems a bit pointless. Each individual page is so 
small that splitting it up into six different pages is just 
counter-productive.

I'd almost suggest making it _one_ page, perhaps with some shortcuts 
within it (ie a "http://git.or.cz/index.html#tools" shortcut within the 
page instead of having a separate "http://git.or.cz/tools.html" page)

Hmm?

In contrast, the wiki frontpage actually works pretty well - it's got more 
of that kind of "multiple sub-headers all on the same page" kind of 
layout, with just extra _details_ behind the links.

I don't know about everybody else, but I get irritated at webpages that 
force me to just switch to another page to get any information. It's like 
how some web journalists split up a story over 20 pages, and each page is 
just a few paragraphs and some graphic (and the commercials, of course).

I'd much rather _scroll_ a bit, or use ^F to _search_, than have to click 
through links.

			Linus
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From: Petr Baudis
Date: Saturday, June 24, 2006 - 3:09 pm

Dear diary, on Sat, Jun 24, 2006 at 10:52:04PM CEST, I got a letter


Good point. When designing the multi-page layout I expected much more
stuff to end up on the homepage but it sort of didn't happen and now the
Wiki seems to work pretty well, so I have folded it all back to a single
page. I ain't no webdesign-ka but it could've turned out worse; as
usual, I'm taking patches.

The menubar should be now actually useful for quick navigation between
various Git-related resources (going to Git's gitweb using this path
should be much faster than over kernel.org, especially when gitweb.cgi

We could put up some commercials as well and use them for funding pizza
distributed in a round-robin fashion between the developers.

-- 
				Petr "Pasky" Baudis
Stuff: http://pasky.or.cz/
A person is just about as big as the things that make them angry.
-

From: Adrien Beau
Date: Saturday, June 24, 2006 - 2:55 pm

The results of the Mercurial survey have been posted there:
http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/UserSurvey

An interesting read.
-

From: Matthias Kestenholz
Date: Saturday, June 24, 2006 - 3:15 pm

I find the answers to the question, what people most like to see
improved interesting: The improvement which got mentioned most often
was "merge across rename", something which git does already.

It seems, that partial checkouts and truncated history are the
only things left to implement for git from this list.

I am looking forward to a git user survey!

	Matthias
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From: Martin Langhoff
Date: Saturday, June 24, 2006 - 4:42 pm

Paolo,

I've seen in the irc logs that you were wondering whether we could a
web-based survey tool. Perhaps I can setup Moodle with an
easy-to-fillout survey. Interested?


martin
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From: Paolo Ciarrocchi
Date: Sunday, June 25, 2006 - 3:47 am

Yes, that would be really fantastic!!

Here is the latest version of the survey, including the comments I
received so far:

About you

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

Getting started with GIT

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

How you use GIT

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

What you think of GIT

    1. Overall, how happy are you with GIT?
    2. How does GIT compare to other SCM tools you have used?
    3. What do you like about using GIT?
    4. What would you most like to see improved about GIT?
       (features, bugs, plugins, documentation, ...)
    5. If you want to see GIT more widely used, what do you
       think we could do to make this happen?

Documentation

    1. Do you use the GIT wiki?   If yes, do you find it useful?
    2. Do you find GIT's online help useful?
    3. What is your favourite user documentation for any software
       projects or products you have used?
    4. What could be improved on the GIT homepage?

Getting help, staying in touch

    1. Have you tried to get GIT help from other people?
          * If yes, did you get these problems resolved quickly and to
            your liking?
    2. Do you subscribe to the mailing list?
          * If yes, do you find it useful, and traffic levels OK?
    3. Do you use the IRC channel (#git on irc.freenode.net)?
          * If no, did you know that all of the core developers use
 ...
From: Junio C Hamano
Date: Sunday, June 25, 2006 - 4:06 am

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

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

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

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

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

-

From: Paolo Ciarrocchi
Date: Sunday, June 25, 2006 - 7:04 am

I think I can remove that part of the sentece, Pasky already had the
same comment when I was discussing the sruvey on #GIT. My mistake.

New version attached.

About you

    1. What country are you in?
    2. What is your preferred language?

Getting started with GIT

    1. How did you hear about GIT?
    2. Did you find GIT easy to learn?
    3. What helped you most in learning to use it?
    4. When did you start using git?

How you use GIT

    1. Do you use GIT for work, unpaid projects, or both?
    2. How do you obtain GIT?  Source tarball, binary package, or
       pull the main repository?
    3. What hardware platforms do you use GIT on?
    4. What OS (please include the version) do you use GIT on?
    5. How many people do you collaborate with using GIT?
    6. How big are the repositories that you work on? (e.g. how many
       files, how much disk space, how deep is the histoty)
    7. How many different projects do you manage using GIT?
    8. Which porcellains do you use?
    9. Is the git.git repository including codes produced by you?

What you think of GIT

    1. Overall, how happy are you with GIT?
    2. How does GIT compare to other SCM tools you have used?
    3. What do you like about using GIT?
    4. What would you most like to see improved about GIT?
       (features, bugs, plugins, documentation, ...)
    5. If you want to see GIT more widely used, what do you
       think we could do to make this happen?

Documentation

    1. Do you use the GIT wiki?   If yes, do you find it useful?
    2. Do you find GIT's online help useful?
    3. What is your favourite user documentation for any software
       projects or products you have used?
    4. What could be improved on the GIT homepage?

Getting help, staying in touch

    1. Have you tried to get GIT help from other people?
          * If yes, did you get these problems resolved quickly and to
            your liking?
    2. Do you subscribe to the mailing list?
    ...
From: Sam Ravnborg
Date: Sunday, June 25, 2006 - 9:20 am

You need to rephase this so it tell for what purpose.

	Sam
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