GitSurvey2006vs2007

OBSOLETE CONTENT

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This is partial comparison of Git User's Survey 2007, (ending at state from 28 September 2007) with previous survey, Git User's Survey 2006.

The data for 2007 survey can be found here: Git User's Survey 2007 - Sep 28 - corrected.csv

The data for 2006 survey was taken from the GitSurvey2006 and GitSurveyData wiki pages

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Table of contents:

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There were 683 individual responses in 2007 survey.
There were around 117 responses in 2006 survey.

There are 62 questions in 2007 survey, and 31 questions (half of the number) in 2006 survey.

About you

01/1. What country are you in?

Answer	2006	2007
Algeria		1
Argentina		3
Australia	3	25
Austria	2	9
Belarus	1
Belgium		5
Brazil	2	20
Bulgaria		1
Canada	3	44
Chile	1	2
China	2	4
Colombia		2
Czech Republic	2	10
Denmark	4	7
Ecuador		1
Estonia	1	1
Europe	1	1
Finland	5	23
France	6	36
Germany	14	64
Greece		3
Hungary		2
India	1	13
Ireland		2
Israel		6
Italy	3	14
Japan		4
Jersey		1
Latvia		1
Lithuania	1
Malaysia		1
Mexico		1
Netherlands	3	15
New Zealand		5
Norway	1	14
Philippines	1	3
Poland	3	6
Portugal		2
Puerto Rico		1
Romania		1
Russian Federation	2	6
Samoa		1
Serbia		1
Singapore		2
Slovak Republic		1
Slovenia		2
South Africa	1	4
Spain	2	11
Sri Lanka		1
Sweden	6	14
Switzerland	1	15
UAE	1
UK / US		1
United Kingdom	8	40
United States of America	35	218
Venezuela		1
Vietnam	1	1
Base	117	683
Total (sum)	117	673

England, Scotland and British Isles counts as United Kingdom here. Table is sorted in alphabetical order.

In both surveys most Git users are in the USA.

There are quite a bit of new countries (in 2007 survey, as compared to survey from 2006), only two vanished. Note that 2007 survey has much more responses, so it is expected.

02/2. What is your preferred non-programming language?

This is multiple answers question, although most people gave only one preferred language.

Answer	2006	2007
Afrikaans		1
Belarusian	1
Bulgarian		1
Castellano		2
Catalan		1
Chinese	1	2
Czech	2	10
Danish	5	6
Dutch	4	12
English	71	416
Estonian	1
Finnish	4	16
French	5	33
Galician		1
German	12	58
Greek		2
Hebrew		1
Hungarian		3
Italian	3	9
Japanese	1	1
LSF (French sign language)		1
Norwegian		4
Polish	3	5
Portuguese		10
Romanian		1
Russian	4	13
Serbian		1
Slovenian		2
Spanish	4	13
Swedish	5	13
Swiss		1
Ukrainian		1
Vietnamese	1	1
invalid (computer language)	?	37
not understood	?	4
Base	117	683
Total (sum)	127	662

Most of git users prefer English language, at least for dealing with computers, the same as before.

In 2006 survey summary the invalid responses were not enumerated / not marked.

The question itself is not well formulated, as one can see from the number of answers with computer language, and "not understood" answers. I am not native English speaker, but there were suggestions to use "natural language" instead of "non-programming language". The question is formulated the same as in previous survey.

03/-. How old are you?

This is new questions, which were not present in previous survey.

04/-. Which programming languages you are proficient with?

This is new questions, which were not present in previous survey.

Getting started with GIT

05/3. How did you hear about GIT?

This question is present in both current (2007) and previous (2006) survey. But because it uses free-form answer, and tabularization (dividing data in categories and generating histogram / counting occurences) is quite different it is not easy to compare results.

In Git User's Survey 2006 (previous survey) the dominant source was LKML (Linux Kernel Mailing List) with 74 / 115 responses, with LWN leading the rest with 11 / 115 count.

Although LKML still dominates the table for current survey, it is not by such a wide margin (109/658 = 17% as compared to 74/115 = 64% in previous one). Many people heard about git because Linux kernel uses it; Linus Torvalds presentation (talk) at Google (Google Video and YouTube) got also high count, bit higher than LWN.

But there was no "I wrote it" response in current survey, though...

06/4. Did you find GIT easy to learn?

Answer	2006		2007
	Count	% sum	Count	% sum
very easy	6	5.1%	38	5.7%
easy	21	17.9%	136	20.4%
reasonably	64	54.4%	318	47.7%
hard	23	19.6%	131	19.8%
very hard	3	2.6%	33	5.0%
Base	117		683
Total (sum)	117	100%	656	100%

Nice gaussian curve both for current survey, and previous year survey data. Most users find GIT reasonably easy to use. The distribution changed slightly in the favor of being more easy to use, but it is not statistically significant change.

07/5. What helped you most in learning to use it?

TO DO. This again is a free-form question, present in both surveys. For current (2007) survey data is not even tabularized yet, although (some) of responses got listed (without a count). I don't think comparison with previous result is any interesting, but previous year data can provide at least some hint on how to divide answers into categories.

08/6. What did you find hardest?

TO DO. Yet another free-form question, present in both surveys. Tabulated for 2006 survey, listed without count for 2007 survey, as for previous question.

09/7. When did you start using git? From which version?

Note; In 2006 survey there was no "From which version?" in question.

TO DO. Again free-form question. Note that in previous survey this question consisted only of the first part, and read "When did you start using git?", so it is date that got tabularized, not git version (mostly). Analysis of current survey data is unfinished, and only answers in which there was given git version explicitely got tabularized. For comparison we would need analysis of answers giving date; and even then I don't think it would be especially useful, unless very coarse-grained (which year for example).

Other SCMs

This whole section (questions 10 to 17) is new, and was not present in previous survey.

How you use GIT

18/8. Do you use GIT for work, unpaid projects, or both?

This question had slightly different wording in 2006 survey: "How you use GIT? Do you use GIT for ...".

Answer / Purpose	2006		2007
	Count	% sum	Count	% sum
work	14	12.0%	56	8.7%
unpaid projects	50	42.8%	212	32.9%
both	53	45.3%	377	58.4%
Base	117		683
Total (sum)	117	100%	645	100%

In the previous survey unpaid projects (only unpaid) were slightly less than half of answers (43 %), while current survey shows that [only] around a third of git users use it only for unpaid projects. So we see more git used for work.

19/9. How do you obtain GIT?

Answer	2006		2007
	Count	% sum	Count	% sum
binary package	31	26.5%	283	43.8%
source tarball	33	28.2%	210	32.5%
pull from main repository	53	45.3%	153	23.7%
Base	117		683
Total (sum)	117	100%	646	100%

As one can see a year ago (in 2006) pull from main repository dominated, while now binary package dominates, and pull is the method least used. At least among people who answered Git User's Survey; the difference might be caused by the fact that previous survey was distributed mainly among readers of git mailing list, who run latest 'master' or even 'next' version, and often contribute to git (see also question 30, "Does git.git repository include code produced by you?").

On the other hand the difference might be caused by the fact that more distributions have got git, or that git is more mature and there is no need to run development version and/or the fact that x.y.z is now development version following 'master' and not 'maint', and includes new features.

Note that all people answered this question in 2006 surve, while in 2007 survey there were some responses with no answer to this question; a few of them were caused by error in first (before starting date) version of this survey.

20/10. What hardware platforms do you use GIT on?

This is free-form question, tabularized for both current and previous survey, but tabularized (slightly) differently. It is not suprising, as extracting architecture and dividing into categories was doneby two different people: Paolo Ciarrocchi (if I remember correctly) for 2006 survey, and Jakub Narebski for 2007.

Moreover the comparison itself is not very interesting; the current data is.

Hardware platfrom tables should relly be generated by someone better versed in computer architecture.

21/11. What OS (please include the version) do you use GIT on?

This question is also free-form. For 2006 survey there is generic count, and two tables: for Linux (distribution or kernel), and for other operating systems. The table for 2007 survey is slightly less generic than the 2006 count, but there are no OS version tables. There is much more data, and more data without version number.

Perhaps we should have provided examples of answers to this question...

Answer	2006	2007
AIX	1	1
FreeBSD	4	16
OpenBSD	-	3
NetBSD	1	-
HP-UX	1	1
IRIX	1	-
Linux	167?	582
MS Windows (Cygwin)	14	22
MS Windows (other)		36
MacOS X / Darwin	11	94
Solaris	3	11
SunOS	-	5

Note that one person can use git on more than one operating system.

The number for Linux from 2006 survey is taken as total for Linux table. "MS Windows (other)" means msys (native) version, or unspecified whether Cygwin or MinGW/MSys. If I remember correctly there were no native Windows version (which is currently under development) during previous survey.

Most is Linux, as before. MacOS X is quite a percentage in current survey, and dominates among non-Linux OS, coming before MS Windows.

22/-. What projects do you track using GIT?

This question was not present in previous survey.

23/12. How many people do you collaborate with using GIT?

Previous (2006) survey have table in two parts: first histogram of simple number of people, second with names of communities (Cairo, Linux kernel, U-Boot,...).

For current (2007) survey only data with number of people or range of numbers were analysed; the answers which give names of communities were not analysed yet.

In the table below we follow ranes used in Git User's Survey 2007 survey analysis.

Number of people	2006	2007
0	32	116
1	6	50
2	10	45
3	9	48
4	5	23
5	9	41
6	1	12
7	2	5
8		11
9-10	8	47
11-15	3	30
16-25	5	26
26-50	2	17
51-100	1	17
100+		8
unknown number	14	79

Footnotes:

Note that the 2006 table had count as first column, and number of people (answer) as second column, while table for 2007 survey and above comparison table has number of people (or range) as first column, and values for 2006 and 2007 survey next.

The histogram for previous (2006) survey is a bit spotty, because of not very large number of responses. Add to that the fact that not all people answered this question, and the fact that not all answers we were able to convert to single number.

24/13. How big are the repositories that you work on?

In previous (2006) survey this question read: "How big are the repositories that you work on? (e.g. how many files, how much disk space, how deep is the history)". For current version of the survey there were explanation how to get number of commits (depth of history), number of contributors (committers), how many files etc. using git tools.

TO DO. To be done both for 2007 (current) survey, and for 2006 one.

25/-. How many different projects do you manage using GIT?

This question was not present in previous survey.

Previous survey has empty question in this place.

26/15. Which porcelains do you use?

The list of porcelains is different for previous and current survey. Git GUIs were moved to the next question ("27. Which git GUI do you use?") in the 2007 survey, and web interfaces ("28. Which (main) git web interface do you use for your projects?") to second next.

Note that there is some ambiguity concerning git-gui: it was put in current survey in the GUI question only, while some people consider it (also) a porcelain (and put is as 'other' in porcelain).

Multiple answers (one can use more than one porcelain).

Answer (multiple choice)	2006	2007
core-git	62	558
cogito (deprecated in 2007)	22	56
Patch management interface:	13	57
StGIT	11	41
Guilt (formerly gq)	n/a	13
pg (deprecated in 2007)	2	3

One has to take into account the fact that neither Cogito nor pg (Patchy GIT) were deprecated during previous survey. Cogito got deprecated because all of its functionality got moved in some way to core git, and because Petr 'Pasky' Baudis, main Cogito developer, didn't/doesn't have time for catching up to new git features.

Guilt is so new that it just simply was not yet created during previous survey.

29/-. How do you publish/propagate your changes?

This question was not present in previous survey.

30/16. Does git.git repository include code produced by you?

(Previous survey had bad English here: "Is the git.git repository including codes produced by you?")

Answer	2006		2007
Count	% sum	Count	% sum
Yes	34	31.8%	99	16.2%
No	73	68.2%	512	83.8%
Base	117		683
Total (sum)	107	100%	611	100%

The trend is much more emphasized: from around third of people who answered this question having their code in git.git (around 32%) a year ago (2006), to a small amount (around 16%, half of it if counting percentage) currently (2007).

This might be cause by the fact that (I think) previous survey was known mostly to people reading git mailing list, who often send their own patches to this list. Therefore there it would be nice to have "How did you heard about this survey?" question. (It would also help finding where it is worth to send notice if/when we would want to make another survey.)

Note also the following little fact:

  $ git shortlog -s --all --before="01-08-2006" || wc -l
  119 (and around 117 individual responses in 2006 survey)
  $ git shortlog -s --all --before="01-10-2007" || wc -l
  215 (and 683 individual responses in 2007 survey)

Internationalization

This whole section (questions 31 to 33) is new, and was not present in previous (2006) survey.

What you think of GIT

34/17. Overall, how happy are you with GIT?

Note: this question in 2006 survey might have been free-form question.

Answer	2006		2007
	Count	% sum	Count	% sum
unhappy	1	0.9%	13	2.0%
not so happy	19	16.5%	36	5.6%
happy	53	46.1%	179	27.9%
very happy	41	35.7%	302	47.0%
completely ecstatic	1	0.9%	112	17.4%
Base	117		683
Total (sum)	115	100%	642	100%

During the year the balance shifted slightly in the positive direction: from mostly happy to very happy, to mostly very happy leaning to happy. And we have much more percentage of completely ecstatic.

Good work!

35/18. How does GIT compare to other SCM tools you have used?

Answer	2006		2007
	Count	% sum	Count	% sum
Better	80	74.1%	505	80.0%
Equal (comparable)	20	18.5%	96	15.2%
Worse	8	7.4%	30	4.8%
Base	117		683
Total (sum)	108	100%	631	100%

Here not much changed. The shape of this histogram is almost the same, with slight shift towards "better than other SCMs used".

Note that 2006 survey has "Equal (or uncomparable)" instead of "Equal (comparable)" as it is now (2007).

36/19. What do you like about using GIT?

TO DO. Yet another free-form question. Tabulated for 2006 survey, most encountered answers listed without count for 2007 survey.

37/20. What would you most like to see improved about GIT?

Features, bugs, plug-ins, documentation,...

TO DO. As above: tabulated somewhat for previous (2006) survey, with the list of ideas (divided broadly into categories) below the table; with some ideas dropped. For current survey there is only list of most commonly encountered, and most interesting ideas.

Some of the 2006 ideas got implemented, or are being implemented, like better documentation (Git User's Manual, documenting options), shallow clones, win32 native binaries (via MinGW -- msysGit project, in development), subproject support (plumbing and beginnings of porcelain), libification and builtinification (GSoC projects), increased verbosity when needed and making error messages more helpful, graphical merges (git-mergetool: interface to file-level graphical mergers like Meld, KDiff3 etc.), per user configuration (~/.gitconfig rather that ~/.gitrc, and there is even system wide configuration). Some of ideas are repeated (like "The Git Book" idea, although "Git User's Manual" fills it somewhat), some ideas provided too hard (e.g. lazy clone aka remote alternates) or without someone to implement them. Some got abandoned, some will probably never get implemented.

Even some suggestions in 2007 survey are actually implemented already, for example git development Changelog (present in the form of RelNotes), shallow clone support, submodules support. This means that new features are not very well announced (which was also one of comments in current survey).

38/21. What is needed for wider GIT adoption?

This question was written as "21. If you want to see GIT more widely used, what do you think we could do to make this happen?" in 2006 survey, and as "38. If you want to see GIT more widely used, what do you think we could do to make this happen?" in current, 2007 survey.

TO DO. List of suggestions for 2006 survey; for current 2007 survey list of suggestions divided into categories. It is more difficult to compare two lists of ideas than to compare tabulated result.

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

This whole section (wuestions from 39 to 43) is of course new (Git User's Survey 2006 was first Git survey ever; git is not very much older than that), and was not present in previous survey.

Documentation

45/22. Do you find GIT wiki useful?

Previous survey has two questions in one here: "Do you use the GIT wiki? If yes, do you find it useful?". This made it hard to distinguish if "no" means "no I don't use GIT wiki" or "no it is not useful" (and makes it almost impossible to compare 2006 and 2007 results).

This was one of the improvements over previous version of survey.

46/-. Do you contribute to GIT wiki?

This question was not present in previous survey.

47. Do you find GIT's on-line help (homepage, documentation) useful?

In 2007 survey there is additional "somewhat useful" answer, which was not present in the 2006 survey.

Answer	2006		2007
	Count	% sum	Count	% sum
Yes	88	81.5%	377	65.3%
No	20	18.5%	28	4.9%
Somewhat	-		172	29.8%
Base	117		683
Total (sum)	108	100%	577	100%

The results are similar: most users find online help useful.

--/24. What is your favourite user documentation?

What is your favourite user documentation for any software projects or products you have used?

This question is present in 2006 survey, and was removed in current one (2007). The idea behind question was I guess to have the results in hand if git ever was to change documentation format. Most likely current format of documentation (AsciiDoc), or at least idea behind it (it should be possible to read sources, and editing sources without specialized editor support should be easy even for people who don't know the format) is here to stay.

48/-. Do you find help distributed with GIT useful?

This questions was not present in previous (2006) survey.

49/-. Did/Do you contribute to GIT documentation?

This questions was not present in previous (2006) survey.

50/25. What could be improved on the GIT homepage?

GIT homepage is on http://git.or.cz

TO DO. List of suggestions for both 2006 and 2007 survey, for current survey divided into categories.

51/-. What topics would you like to have on GIT wiki?

This questions was not present in previous (2006) survey.

52/-. What could be improved in GIT documentation?

This questions was not present in previous (2006) survey.

Getting help, staying in touch

53/26. Have you tried to get GIT help from other people?

Answer	2006		2007
	Count	% sum	Count	% sum
Yes	68	60.2%	357	57.8%
No	45	39.8%	261	42.2%
Base	117		683
Total (sum)	113	100%	618	100%

Around 60% of people tried to get GIT help from other people, for both current (2007) and previous (2006) survey.

54/27. If yes, did you get these problems resolved quickly and to your liking?

Answer	2006		2007
	Count	% sum	Count	% sum
Yes	68	60.2%	326	86.0%
No	45	39.8%	53	14.0%
Base	117		683
Total (sum)	113	100%	379	100%

The precentage was a bit worse during earlier survey (around 60%) than for corrent one (around 86%).

This might be caused by the fact that git is now more userfriendly, and has more features, and problems are easier to resolve.

55/-. Would commerical (paid) support would be of interest?

Would commerical (paid) support from a support vendor be of interest to you/your organization?

This question was not present in previous survey. It was requested during an RFC for this year (2007) survey.

56/28. Do you read/subscribe the mailing list?

Answer	2006		2007
	Count	% sum	Count	% sum
Yes	67	57.3%	204	33.4%
No	50	42.7%	406	66.6%
Base	117		683
Total (sum)	117	100%	610	100%

Note that 2006 version had "subscribe" instead of "read" in this question. Even despite this fact, the number of people reading git mailing list decreased from more than half (around 57%) to around third (around 33%). This might be caused by the fact that notice / info about Git User's Survey 2006 was distributed mainly among git mailing list and among mailing lists for projects which use git (see also commets to questions 19 and 30).

The fact that only one third of git users are reading mailing list (which is nevertheless quite large percentage) means that features have to be documented somewhere besides mailing list archive and logs (commit messages).

58/29. Do you find traffic levels on GIT mailing list OK?

Previous (2006) survey has two questions in one here: "If yes, do you find it useful, and traffic levels OK?". They were split in current (2007) survey.

59/30. Do you use the IRC channel (#git on irc.freenode.net)?

Answer	2006		2007
	Count	% sum	Count	% sum
Yes	23	19.8%	182	32.6%
No	93	80.2%	376	67.4%
Base	117		683
Total (sum)	116	100%	558	100%

More people use #git channel now (33% as compared to 20% before).

Nevertheless relatively few people use this form of communication and getting help.

60/-. If yes, do you find IRC channel useful?

This question was not present in previous survey. It nicely follows in the series of questions about git wiki and git mailing list (do you use? is it useful?).

61/-. What can be improved about getting help?

Full title of this question in 2007 survey is: "61. Did you have problems getting GIT help on mailing list or on IRC channel? What were it? What could be improved?"

This question was not present in previous survey.

Open forum

62/32. What other comments or suggestions do you have that are not covered by the questions above?

TO DO. There is list of responses for 2006 and for 2007 survey.

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References

• GitSurvey2006 - Git User's Survey 2006 (first one)
• GitSurvey2007 - Git User's Survey 2007

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