[RFC] GIT user survey

[RFC] GIT user survey

[Paolo Ciarrocchi]

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 list?
          * If yes, do you find it useful, and traffic levels OK?
    3. Do you use the IRC channel (#git on irc.freenode.net)?
          * If no, did you know that all of the core developers use
            IRC, and that there's almost 24-hour help available?

Open forum

    1. What other comments or suggestions do you have that are not
       covered by the questions above?


What do people living in this ML think about this suvery?
Do you have any suggestion?
Do you think it worth the effort?

Thanks in advace.

Regards,

-- 
Paolo
http://paolociarrocchi.googlepages.com
http://picasaweb.google.com/paolo.ciarrocchi

Re: [RFC] GIT user survey

[Randal L. Schwartz]

>>>>> "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!

Re: [RFC] GIT user survey

[Paolo Ciarrocchi]

On 24 Jun 2006 10:05:33 -0700, Randal L. Schwartz <merlyn@stonehenge.com> wrote:
> >>>>> "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??

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

Ciao,

-- 
Paolo
http://paolociarrocchi.googlepages.com
http://picasaweb.google.com/paolo.ciarrocchi

Re: [RFC] GIT user survey

[Randal L. Schwartz]

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

Paolo> On 24 Jun 2006 10:05:33 -0700, Randal L. Schwartz <merlyn@stonehenge.com> wrote:
>> >>>>> "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??

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!

Re: [RFC] GIT user survey

[Petr Baudis]

Dear diary, on Sat, Jun 24, 2006 at 09:54:38PM CEST, I got a letter
where "Randal L. Schwartz" <merlyn@stonehenge.com> said that...
> 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?

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.

Re: [RFC] GIT user survey

[Linus Torvalds]

On Sat, 24 Jun 2006, Petr Baudis wrote:
> 
> 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.

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

Re: [RFC] GIT user survey

[Adrien Beau]

On 6/24/06, Paolo Ciarrocchi <paolo.ciarrocchi@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
> (...)
>
> What do people living in this ML think about this suvery?
> Do you have any suggestion?
> Do you think it worth the effort?

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

An interesting read.

Re: [RFC] GIT user survey

[Petr Baudis]

Dear diary, on Sat, Jun 24, 2006 at 10:52:04PM CEST, I got a letter
where Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> said that...
> 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.

Wow, finally some more feedback on the homepage!

> 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)

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
has its bad days over there).

> 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).

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.

Re: [RFC] GIT user survey

[Matthias Kestenholz]

* Adrien Beau (adrienbeau@gmail.com) wrote:
> 
> The results of the Mercurial survey have been posted there:
> http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/UserSurvey
> 
> An interesting read.

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

Re: [RFC] GIT user survey

[Martin Langhoff]

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

Re: [RFC] GIT user survey

[Paolo Ciarrocchi]

On 6/25/06, Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

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
            IRC, and that there's almost 24-hour help available?

Open forum

    1. What other comments or suggestions do you have that are not
       covered by the questions above?


Ciao,

-- 
Paolo
http://paolociarrocchi.googlepages.com
http://picasaweb.google.com/paolo.ciarrocchi

Re: [RFC] GIT user survey

[Junio C Hamano]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re: [RFC] GIT user survey

[Paolo Ciarrocchi]

On 6/25/06, Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net> wrote:
> "Paolo Ciarrocchi" <paolo.ciarrocchi@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > About you
> >
> >    1. What country are you in?
> >    2. What is your preferred language?
> >    3. What's your gender?
>
> Demography is interesting and quite relevant to understand the
> bias in the answers to the rest of the questions, although I do
> not see much point about #3.  Question #2 is relevant in i18n,
> of course.

Yeah, removed item #3.

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

OK.

> > Getting started with GIT
> >
> >    1. How did you hear about GIT?
> >    2. Did you find GIT easy to learn?
> >    3. What helped you most in learning to use it?
>
> Also "When did you start using git?" -- old timers who learned
> git when it was still young and small would have had an easier
> time to learn it.

OK.

> > How you use GIT
> >
> >    1. Do you use GIT for work, unpaid projects, or both?
> >    2. How do you obtain GIT?  Source tarball, binary package, or
> >       pull the main repository?
> >    3. What platforms (hardware, OS, version) do you use GIT on?
> >    4. How many people do you collaborate with using GIT?
> >    5. How big are the repositories that you work on? (e.g. how many
> >       files, how much disk space)
> >    6. How many different projects do you manage using GIT?
> >    7. Which porcelains do you use?
>
> After seeing the Mercurial survey result, I think question #3
> should be stated a bit more concretely.  The results having
> mixture of i386 and Linux are not very interesting.  I would
> also add "how deep the history" to #5.

OK

> > Getting help, staying in touch
> >
> >    1. Have you tried to get GIT help from other people?
> >          * If yes, did you get these problems resolved quickly and to
> >            your liking?
> >    2. Do you subscribe to the mailing list?
> >          * If yes, do you find it useful, and traffic levels OK?
> >    3. Do you use the IRC channel (#git on irc.freenode.net)?
> >          * If no, did you know that all of the core developers use
> >            IRC, and that there's almost 24-hour help available?
>
> About #3, I do not see some people I consider "core" often on
> the IRC.  Maybe "most of the core".

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?
          * If yes, do you find it useful, and traffic levels OK?
    3. Do you use the IRC channel (#git on irc.freenode.net)?


Open forum

    1. What other comments or suggestions do you have that are not
       covered by the questions above?


-- 
Paolo
http://paolociarrocchi.googlepages.com
http://picasaweb.google.com/paolo.ciarrocchi

Re: [RFC] GIT user survey

[Sam Ravnborg]

Hi
>    2. What is your preferred language?
You need to rephase this so it tell for what purpose.

	Sam

Re: [RFC] GIT user survey

[Jakub Narebski]

Matthias Kestenholz <lists@spinlock.ch> wrote:
> Adrien Beau (adrienbeau@gmail.com) wrote:
>> 
>> The results of the Mercurial survey have been posted there:
>> http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/UserSurvey
>> 
>> An interesting read.
> 
> 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 think that at least some of the infrastructure for partial checkouts
is in place due to preliminary work for subproject (gitlink or bind)
support in git: git-read-tree and git-write-tree --prefix=<prefix>/
option suppport. But I might be mistaken.

Truncating history "by hand" is possible even now, using graft file.
There is recurring talk about "shallow clones", lately about "lazy clones".
There were mentioned here also split-history idea and sparse clone idea.  

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Warsaw, Poland
ShadeHawk on #git

Re: [RFC] GIT user survey

[Jakub Narebski]

Paolo Ciarrocchi wrote:

> 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 DRAFT here:
> http://paolo.ciarrocchi.googlepages.com/GITSurvey

Could you please add the final version (and of course results) on
Git Wiki (http://git.or.cz/gitwiki), like original one is on Mercurial
wiki: http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/UserSurvey ?

Thanks in advance

P.S. I wonder why my Mozilla 1.7.12 sees GITSurvey as binary/octet-stream
instead of text/plain file...
-- 
Jakub Narebski
Warsaw, Poland
ShadeHawk on #git

Re: [RFC] GIT user survey

[Pavel Roskin]

On Tue, 2006-07-04 at 17:28 +0200, Jakub Narebski wrote:
> Paolo Ciarrocchi wrote:
> 
> > 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 DRAFT here:
> > http://paolo.ciarrocchi.googlepages.com/GITSurvey
> 
> Could you please add the final version (and of course results) on
> Git Wiki (http://git.or.cz/gitwiki), like original one is on Mercurial
> wiki: http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/index.cgi/UserSurvey ?
> 
> Thanks in advance
> 
> P.S. I wonder why my Mozilla 1.7.12 sees GITSurvey as binary/octet-stream
> instead of text/plain file...

It's not a Mozilla thing.  It's a server configuration.

$ wget http://paolo.ciarrocchi.googlepages.com/GITSurvey
--00:52:45--  http://paolo.ciarrocchi.googlepages.com/GITSurvey
           => `GITSurvey'
Resolving paolo.ciarrocchi.googlepages.com... 64.233.179.93,
64.233.179.91
Connecting to paolo.ciarrocchi.googlepages.com|64.233.179.93|:80...
connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 2,078 (2.0K) [application/octet-stream]


Regarding the questions (sorry, I could have missed comments of others):

  What is your preferred language?

Preferred to type or preferred to speak?  There answer is not always the
same, at least for me.

  How did you hear about GIT?

With my own ears.  "How did you learn about GIT" would be better because
many respondents probably _read_ about GIT first.

s/histoty/history
s/porcellains/porcelains/

What is the "history depth"?  How do I measure it?

  Which porcelains do you use?

Which child did you abuse today?  Let's avoid loaded questions.  Some
people are just fine with bare git.

Have you tried to get GIT help from other people?

  Better: Have you asked other people to help you with GIT? 

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin