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The State of Version Control: an Infographic

244 points by gecko 16y ago

danssig 16y ago
Good to see that modern revision control systems are starting to gain on SVN. EDIT: Removed incorrect statement about 63% stat.
- CaptainDecisive 16y ago
  The 63% refers to people who dont use code review tools, not people who dont use version control.
- carson 16y ago
  That is 63% that don't do code reviews. I think it is put together oddly because I thought that as well at first but later in the description they talk about code reviews.
  - deleted 16y ago
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brown9-2 16y ago
And, you'll be increasingly coming across Mercurial, since it's been adopted by Mozilla four years ago, by Google in 2009, and is preferred by Windows, Python, and Django developers. (89% of our respondents have heard of GitHub and 62% of its Mercurial sibling BitBucket.) "Adopted by Google" here seems a bit disingenuous; they offer Mercurial as an option for developers that want to host their OSS projects with Google, it isn't as if Google's in-house source control has moved to Mercurial.
- reedlaw 16y ago
  What do they use in-house?
  - gecko 16y ago
    Perforce.
    - powdahound 16y ago
      I've heard that the server it runs on is the most powerful machine Google owns. Perforce can't be distributed and has to keep track of all the files that are opened by every user (p4 edit). Must be quite a beast.
      - mosburger 16y ago
        When I last used Perforce about five years ago, it did allow for read-only proxies to help reduce the load on the main server, particularly in environments where the developers were geographically dispersed. It worked quite well.
      - snprbob86 16y ago
        And when I was there a few years ago, it was also the slowest service with the most downtime. grumblegrumble* I hope that they have addressed that by now.
        nostrademons 16y ago
        Nope, it's still basically that way. Well, Mondrian seems to have more downtime, but a lot of Mondrian outages are really Perforce outages that propagate down the stack.
      - mcbain 16y ago
        Both Google and Perforce have talked about the install from time to time - for example this 2007 paper: http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/34459.pdf http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/34459.pdf
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - tghw 16y ago
igneous4 16y ago
Bazaar is conspicuously missing. My guess is that "other" is mostly Bazaar. Aside: would've been neat to see a "version control by OS" pie chart for GNU/Linux.
- gecko 16y ago
  That's because it was conspicuously missing as an answer from our respondents.
- laskito 16y ago
  Don't forget Fossil
- rm445 16y ago
  If the survey was done properly, then 'other' consists of lots of different things and bzr is just a small chunk of it not worth dealing with separately. If the survey was done badly, with an 'other' option with no way to write in what you use, then potentially all of the 'other' block could be bzr. It would just be left out by the survey writer not having heard of it.
- durin42 16y ago
  I'm not so sure. All but one of the Bazaar users I know uses it only because Canonical and/or GNU* require it. * Emacs uses Bazaar for "branding" reasons IIRC.
- alkaramba 16y ago
  We got exactly four responses for Bazaar and one for Fossil out of nearly a thousand. They are just tiny in comparison to the rest.
  - riffraff 16y ago
    given that 'others' does not seem to be 0.5% of the chart: what else is in there?
    - stonemetal 16y ago
pclark 16y ago
Out of 1000 respondents: > 70% of programmers today are Windows based, 16% use Ubuntu/CentOS or other Linux, and 14% use Mac OS Is this a skewed survey towards Microsoft orientated people, or is this the normal for the developer industry? (hard to say when you are in a bubble/niche of web startups)
- gecko 16y ago
  This is probably skewed. We did our best to make sure we were getting a wide swath of respondents by also running the survey on StackOverflow, but even there, our choice of which tags to advertise the survey with probably biased the results. I'd take the OS distribution not as an indication of who in general developers for which OS, but rather just as information on which percentage of respondents were on which OS. I.e., it tells you about the survey, not about developers in general.
  - technomancy 16y ago
    Stackoverflow itself seemed pretty Windows-centric last I looked at it. Makes sense considering it was launched by two prominent Windows developers.
    - statictype 16y ago
      For some time, when Apple had its goofy NDA on the iPhone SDK when it was first released, Stackoverflow was probably the best site to get CocoaTouch related help. It's still a pretty decent resource for iPhone development.
  - streeter 16y ago
    I'm not as convinced this is terribly skewed away from the normal. Outside the Bay Area, the large organizations that hire thousands of programmers primarily use Windows for development. For example, go to any Defense Contractor (Lockheed, Northrop, etc) in the country and sample the computers they use for dev work. Each developer probably has a Windows box they do everything on. There might be some Linux boxes mixed in, but those will probably be headless. Or the developer runs Linux in a VM on top of Windows. While in the Bay Area, we might think these are skewed because everywhere we go we see Mac laptops, in reality, the employees at big corporations are going to outnumber us.
snowwindwaves 16y ago
They state in the last paragraph that Ubuntu+CentOS+Other Linux OS market share in the survey was 16% which puts it ahead of OSX but they chose to separate Other Linux out in the chart so visually it doesn't seem as significant. Maybe I'm used to always reading Linux market share at 1% so I want to see that big circle even if it is from a non-representational group.
yannickmahe 16y ago
A fascinating read. HgInit.com is the site that got me to Mercurial. I now use it for all my personnal projects. Unintended side-effect though: pains with working with SVN at my day job became more obvious.
bradleyland 16y ago
"We asked subscribers to our developer newsletter (788 respondents) and professional developers via StackOverflow (169 respondents)." With all due respect to the FogCreek team, I'm not sure these numbers could be considered a representation of the development community in general. FogCreek makes Kiln, which according to Joel's (FogCreek CEO) blog is "a web-based version control and code review system based on Mercurial and tightly integrated with FogBugz." I know Joel's writing has broad appeal (I know I'm a fan), but it would stand to reason that there would be a disproportionately high number of Hg users in these results, would it not?
- jfm3 16y ago
  Amen. Whenever I read a joel-on-software or FogCreek blog post, I feel like I'm being exposed to a clever advertisement, where the clever factor decreases linearly over time. This isn't the first time I've seen appeal-to-authority arguments, bad statistics, or other dubious rhetoric there.
- tghw 16y ago
  We compared the numbers we got from our newsletter survey and those we got from Stack Overflow and they were actually much closer than even we expected. Mercurial gets a slight bump in our newsletter responses, but SVN still dominates across the board.
  - xbryanx 16y ago
    And if you look at questions on Stack Overflow you've got: 532 tagged [Git] 119 tagged [Mercurial] Just to give you a (unscientific) sense of the bias in the Stack Overflow community.
    - sgift 16y ago
      I think this metric is not really useful: Maybe git is just harder to use (no git/mercurial please, just my first thought on the usage of question tags as a - unscientific - metric).
MatthewPhillips 16y ago
Personally I use github for projects I want to link to on my resume and bitbucket for websites and stuff I don't want to share with the world (yet). Maybe it's because I'm a novice user who only does the basic commands, but I see no real difference between git and mercurial. I use TFS in my professional job and am pretty surprised that so many people like it. Everyone I work with either hates it or lives with it. Doing stuff like moving changes from one branch to another is unreasonably hard.
- billybob 16y ago
  Scott Chacon (author of Pro Git, Git evangelist for Github) has said in his Changelog interview that Git and Mercurial are in fact extremely similar. He wrote some kind of tool for letting the two work together, so he had to learn the internals of both to do so. His take was, use either one. Just make sure you use distributed version control.
- boyter 16y ago
  I work with TFS (migrating to it and some things on it already) and I hate working with it. Every single thing it does is a little bit worse then the tools its replacing in my case. The out of the box diff sucks, its slow, buggy, get latest dosn't, commits sometimes just fail to commit, the CI builds fail for random reasons, the ticketing system only lets you remove time from tasks (not track them). Its stupid you have to use Visual Studio, Shell Extensions AND command line just to make it work correctly. Anyone considering moving to TFS better seriously consider their needs before doing it. If you are purely a MS shop, are prepared to spend days fighting the tool, or are happy to go with the defaults, and have big beefy servers sitting around doing nothing then consider TFS. Otherwise go SVN Jira Fisheye and Crucible. Trust me it will be better and cheaper.
jcromartie 16y ago
The infographic makes it look like half of VSS users love it. But later on, the article states that zero VSS users said they loved it.
- yock 16y ago
  Right, I was wondering about that too. Same for CVS.
- MartinCron 16y ago
  I think the response options were more than just love/hate, and that the infographic is representing that about half of the VSS users are "meh".
- gecko 16y ago
  For each VCS, you had to pick between love, like, meh, bleh, and ptooey (I don't remember the exact word options). The infographic attempts to just merge those into degree-of-like, which I believe was done by assigning weights to passion and then averaging.
  - ohashi 16y ago
    I think you missed the point. The graphic doesn't effectively communicate the underlying data. I was also thrown by the graphic and words. 3 hearts/stars/whatever to me means average. Zero people saying they love a system to me indicates less than average. I don't fault you for trying to communicate it the way you did, it makes sense from one perspective, but from a user standpoint it's confusing when combined with the text.
    - gecko 16y ago
      Personally, I agree. I know our graphics designer whipped up one of the actual bell curve per VCS. Hopefully, we'll post it later.
jsdalton 16y ago
The article mentions Kiln (http://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/ http://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/) as a code review tool. What other code review/collaboration tools are people using with Git and/or Mercurial?
- markstahler 16y ago
  Reviewboard http://www.reviewboard.org/ http://www.reviewboard.org/
- xiongchiamiov 16y ago
  GitHub's pull requests work pretty nicely for code review.
mberning 16y ago
I don't understand our obsession with version control systems. I still find that SVN meets my needs 95% of the time. I've used git for my projects that are hosted on heroku, but I've never been so impressed with it that I want to completely move to git.
- dpritchett 16y ago
  How many people are working on your projects? Remember that Linus created git to scratch his own itch in managing patch submissions to the Linux kernel. If you've got squillions of people you don't know working 24/7 around the globe to come up with patches to your C-based system, then git was designed for you. If you're a one- or two-man team who svn merges twice a day, you might not care. Spolsky did a decent job outlining the headaches that DVCS is designed to solve: http://hginit.com/ http://hginit.com/
- xbryanx 16y ago
  As someone whose duties include branch management and team happiness, moving the DVCS has been a revolution. Improved my job happiness significantly.
- patio11 16y ago
  So I started using git with my latest project, just to get a feel for what all the Ruby on Rails guys were talking about when they weren't bragging about the size of their Macbooks. The koolaid is delicious. Even in a one-man, one-repo world, I spend a lot less time fighting my VCS for dominance. Example from today: I was working on my deploy branch, where I typically only make to-be-deployed-within-the-hour microchanges. Then I saw another bug, so I squashed it. Commit. Then I saw another bug. So I squashed it. Commit. Then I saw a major opportunity for a simplification with a refactoring. Then I realized the refactoring was under-tested and that failures would be catastrophic, so I started adding extra tests. Now I'm fifteen commits past the last deploy, I have code that I'm 85% positive works on my must-not-fail deploy branch, there is one commit in there which addresses a bug which I want dead, and it is quitting time. I have been in this state in SVN before. Recovery is NOT fun. git branch all-the-work-i-did-today #Creates a new branch whose history looks exactly like deploy's does. git reset --hard production_deploy_92 #Moves head of deploy branch to the tag of the last deploy, essentially forgetting commits afterwards. git cherry-pick carefully_copy_pasted_hash #Nabs the one bug fix that I really wanted to deploy today. Git makes my development and deployment processes better. Transformatively better, in some cases.
zdw 16y ago
I wonder how much further along git would be on Windows if it had run better on that platform historically, and had a better GUI. The Mac numbers don't surprise me at all, as the large influx of unix people to the platform are more used to using CLI tools. (yes, I'm saying that on the whole, Mac users are less afraid of the CLI than Windows users. Shocker!)
- cincinnatus 16y ago
  Yes, GIT is way more hassle than it should be. I hate that it depends on cygwin and msysgit is a great start but still a little alien feeling. I disagree with the blanket statement about Mac users. Developers using Mac are not Mac users by a long shot. For most of us I know it is a case of the Mac being a better *nix dev box than the alternatives.
  - maw 16y ago
    I agree that many developers on Macs aren't traditional Mac users, but disagree that OSX is a better Unix. I'd say it's an ok-to-good Unix, but one where sound, copy and paste, and wireless networking all work--and that it's these that compensate for other shortcomings as compared to Linux or FreeBSD.
- danssig 16y ago
  Actually, I use Git on Mac and I switched because of GitX. I don't consider the CLI a legitimate interface personally.
  - akavlie 16y ago
    Don't consider it a legitimate interface? Really? It's the interface git was designed for.
    - Johngibb 16y ago
      I find it way easier to visualize a diff in a gui. That's primarily what GitX brings to the party. For almost any feature other than git log and git commit, you still need to hit the CLI. (I DO think this means there's a great deal of potential profit available to someone who releases a GREAT git gui for OS X)
arn 16y ago
Does anyone else find it surprising that SlashDot is the highest ranked favorite tech website amongst respondents?
- nkassis 16y ago
  Not really, I think it's still the most popular. At least from my personal experience. It's mostly due to age I think. Reddit is slowly gaining I think but I know many people who've never heard of Reddit. Digg well I don't know if they still have fans anymore. HN hopefully will never outrank Slashdot. This is from an unscientific survey of my friends and coworkers.
- Silhouette 16y ago
  Personally I've all but given up posting on Slashdot and reading the discussions since their latest redesign a few weeks ago. I was sad to do so (I first hit the karma cap back when you could still see the numerical value, for those who want to judge my "Slashdot age") but it's just too tedious to navigate the comments and too buggy to interact at all now. I still find it a useful source of general geek interest articles, though. I've been posting more on HN recently, but I find HN links and discussions tend to fall sharply into three categories: general technical/business discussions between well-informed people, material about YC start-ups or other businesses that have no particular relevance to me, and flamefests that are full of people who think they know everything and clearly don't know much about anything. The first group is enough to justify my coming here. I'm trying to be better at ignoring the second and not feeding the trolls in the third. Reddit is a curious middle-ground, because of the subreddit system. I follow a few subreddits that generally have high quality content and one or two that are mostly lighthearted, and I ignore the rest, including most of the main ones. TechCrunch sometimes carries interesting news, but as with HN, a lot of it isn't particularly relevant to me and a significant amount is just the personal opinion/ego of whoever got to write on TechCrunch this week. Given this balance, it doesn't surprise me to see the relative popularity of the sites shown as it is in the infographic.
- petercooper 16y ago
  Given that 70% of the respondents are also using Windows, no. But it's a good thing, really. They're weeks behind with the latest news and decades behind with their operating systems.. we can't fail! :-)
smiler 16y ago
Biggest statistic is that 60% of people are not using source control professionally!!
- simonista 16y ago
  I think you misread. It's 63% of people not using code review professionally.
  - smiler 16y ago
    Yes sorry, my mistake :|
- shepting 16y ago
  Actually, I think that was people not using code review tools professionally.
prosa 16y ago
Did anyone else notice the that the chart, "Do People Love or Hate their Version Control System?" was horribly misleading? CVS gets 3.5 hearts, and SVN gets nearly 4. Meanwhile, far below on the page: "Only 11% of Subversion users said that they loved using it; the number was zero for CVS and VSS."
- gjm11 16y ago
  I assume the survey had options like love / like / tolerate / dislike / loathe-with-the-fury-of-a-thousand-exploding-suns and the heart graphic was derived from some combination of those rather than just how many chose the "love" option. "Love or like", perhaps. [EDITED to add: actually, more likely an average score, like the ratings on Amazon.]
- mnutt 16y ago
  The hearts chart also bothered me in that the lines were diagonal making it difficult to compare at a glance.
- fhars 16y ago
  They were probably calculating the mean of a Likert scale, which is often coonsidered an analysis error.
yock 16y ago
> Only 11% of Subversion users said that they loved using it; the number was zero for CVS and VSS. Compare that to the over 40% of Mercurial and Git users that love using them! Is it just me or doesn't this not reconcile with the relevant portion of the graphic?
- icefox 16y ago
  Same with the "47% of developers use it as their primary version control system at work" Shouldn't that be more like ~20% given that the two pie charts for win/mac showed ~40 and ~15?
  - yock 16y ago
    That seems to refer to Subversion, which seems to jive with the top bar graph.
asnyder 16y ago
No Darcs? Personally I prefer darcs over other distributed version control systems, unfortunately their tooling is somewhat behind and due to the github craze we're forced to use git on many projects,it's very sad as the ease, the features, and simplicity of darcs is in my opinion unparalleled by any of the others listed.
- gjm11 16y ago
  The last time I looked at darcs -- which, admittedly, was years ago -- there was a problem where, under certain poorly understood circumstances that tended to apply to most people with large repositories, performance would fall off a cliff, meaning IIRC that from then on, every merge could take hours. Or years -- I think it went exponential. The Wikipedia page about darcs says "Although the issue was not completely corrected in Darcs 2, exponential merges have been minimized." I wonder what "minimized" means here. On the face of it, this seems like a pretty compelling reason not to use darcs for anything important.
  - asnyder 16y ago
    I haven't experienced that issue in years. I do remember the issues it had before, and thankfully they seem to have been addressed. I don't know how up to date the Wikipedia entry is, but to the best of my knowledge this issue has been resolved, especially if you use darcs2 formatted repos.
- danssig 16y ago
  I love Darcs conceptually and I used it for a few years but after moving to Git I have to say I prefer it. Darcs is certainly cleaner than how Git is actually implemented (scripts and perl everywhere) but Git is nicer to work with day to day. The reason is that in Darcs to make a branch you have to basically check out the tree again. In Git I never need more than my repo directory. All branch checkouts, etc. happen right in that directory. That may sound like a trivial difference but in practice this can save hours a week for the way I work. Git can do most of the cherry picking, etc. that Darcs can do. I do miss the ability to check in changes that I only ever want to have local though. I haven't found a satisfactory way to do that in Git yet.
famousactress 16y ago
I find it a bit surprising (if not hard to believe) that hg is more common than git in professional use. That said, I don't find it hard to believe that hg users have more love for their tool than git users.. Before becoming an avid git user I tried both and found hg's commands much more lucid.
- statictype 16y ago
  Git support on Windows was really poor for some time (I gather it has improved though), whereas Mercurial pretty much always treated Windows as a first-class citizen. That may have something to do with it. On the other hand, I do find it hard to believe that hg users love their tools more. Generally my impression has been that git attracts a lot of people who are, shall we say, passionate about their particular version control system.
  - famousactress 16y ago
    Ahh.. The windows bit makes perfect sense. I wasn't aware (not a Windows user). Excellent point about git's community also. As obtuse as the commands can be (Really? git push :branch_name DELETES a remote branch?), I still love it. Also, the relatively high number of people who claim to love cvs in the survey suggests the bar for satisfaction might not be very high here :|
- megaman821 16y ago
  Why surprising? I find SVN still dominates but of those who have made the change to a DVCS the distance from SVN to Mercurial is less than SVN to Git.
  - famousactress 16y ago
    Because the momentum behind git is huge. Like I said, I preferred hg at first glance and still ended up a git user because most of the people I wanted to work with were on-board and github is awesome.
    - 16y ago
frobozz 16y ago
I'm surprised at how loved perforce is. Whenever I have to do anything on a perforce repository I think, "Oh no, not this again!"
- blasdel 16y ago
  Sounds like you've never had to do anything with ClearCase, VSS, TFS, or any of those other abortions. Perforce may be a VCS for managers by managers, but at least it's a technically competent implementation of a bad idea.
  - frobozz 16y ago
    No, I've suffered VSS, but that is quite rightly positioned at the bottom of the love/hate scale (IIRC. They've taken the image down). Perforce had just under 4 hearts out of 5, with Mercurial and Git being just over 4 out of 5.
paulgb 16y ago
Not to nitpick, but the "Most Used Operating System Professionally" portion misrepresents the data. The area should be proportional to the values, not the radius. Notice that the Windows XP circle is over 4X as big as the Mac OS one, even though it's only twice the value.
- tghw 16y ago
  Are you sure those aren't spheres? 'Cause if they were, then it should really be volume, not area.
kenjackson 16y ago
CVCSes work OK. But they all miss a critical piece. They aren't nearly as good at doing one of the main things that a version control system can let you do: branching and experimenting with your code I hear this complaint a lot, but I do this all the time with SVN. Just have a directory (tempbranches) where you create your branches. It's probably something I do once a week (and not because I feel limited to only doing it once per week, but most of my work occurs in my local branch -- and I branch that one only when I want to do something that is more experimental, but will take a few days). I'll grant that its not as clean as a DVCS for this, but it works just as easily. The big difference is that we now have centralized accounting of this action, rather than it being distributed.
- famousactress 16y ago
  but it works just as easily Um, are you sure? I find branching and merging in git (after three months using it) much, much, much easier than I did in SVN (after 7 years of using it).
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    Can you expand. Because I've probably done a few hundred SVN branches. And probably 100 Git branches. The big advantage I had with Git was that since it is decentralized, you don't have branches on the server (so no need to have a tempbranch target on the server). But that doesn't seem like a huge deal to me. The actual activity of branching and merging seem equally easy to me.
    - famousactress 16y ago
      Relatively unscientific, but git merges feel smarter. It notices when I've moved a file (without telling it I did), and I experience fewer conflicts that I was used to. Some possible suggestions as to why here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5035531/how-is-dvcs-git-mercurial-branching-and-merging-support-better-than-svns http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5035531/how-is-dvcs-git-m... Also, the fact that commits have an atomic life is useful. If I cherry pick a change into a branch and then later merge it, Git generally knows what's up. With SVN this sort of scenario seemed to confuse things. Another advantage to this model is that it's very easy to compare (what commits differ between these, instead of a big code diff). The differences may be subtle, but all in all I find myself much happier and more likely to use branches than I used to.
zinssmeister 16y ago
for http://www.virtualrockstars.com http://www.virtualrockstars.com I am using SVN, simply because that's what I used before and I didn't know of Git being so awesome at the time. But I must say SVN is still pretty good... I agree that you can't love it compared to Git but its pretty pretty good.
haberman 16y ago
I'm becoming less enamored with git over time. I've used it for years (by choice, and I'm a GitHub user), but have never been a power user. I'm annoyed at how the very most basic workflows in Git seem awkward, like I'm working against the tool instead of with it. The simplest example is: I have a hacked-up tree, but I know changes have been made upstream, and I want to pull those changes: $ git pull Updating 73f91c3..0ee9fa8 error: Entry 'README' not uptodate. Cannot merge. It's complaining because I've modified README locally, which was also modified remotely. Every other reasonable version control system I've ever used will happily merge the upstream changes with my not-yet-committed local changes. But Git refuses. This is annoying. What I have to do now is commit my hacked-up, non-compiling, possibly-swear-word-containing in-progress changes. I really dislike this. To me, "commit" means "take a finished bit of work and add it to the global history." I really dislike having to commit something that is extremely unfinished just because I wanted to integrate some upstream changes. So what I usually do in this situation is "git stash", "git pull", "git stash apply." This works ok for the "pull" case. But what if I have multiple sets of locally-hacked-up changes? Like suppose I was working on one change when I realized that there's something else I should really fix first. "git stash" quickly becomes limiting, since you can't name the individual changes, so you get this list of changes that you don't know what they are or what branch/commit they were based on. In other VCS's like Perforce, you can have multiple sets of independent changes in your working tree. Not possible with Git AFAIK. Anyway, I'll probably keep using Git, but I'm not as enamored with it as I once was. I used to figure this was all just porcelain issues that would be refined over time, but it doesn't seem to be getting any better.
- mseebach 16y ago
  It seems that what you're really hitting is the, erhm, ill-advised decision to name most of git's most common actions the same as actions in subversion, but make them do significantly different things. Git's "commit" should probably have been named "mark" or whatever because "push" is what's actually comparable to a subversion commit. I've mostly conditioned myself by now, but I also recall some fun with checkout.
  - haberman 16y ago
amitraman1 16y ago
The learning curve on git is high, but I understand the benefits. We use it at my current company , but we do make mistakes with it. Windows + SVN is so easy to use (and so entrenched), I'd recommend to new developers & students to learn SVN.
- DamagedProperty 16y ago
  Can you explain why the learning curve on git is high? I have been using it for a couple of months after SVN completely dorked my project. I have not found git hard to use. What aspect of git is hard to learn?
  - kgo 16y ago
    I like git just fine, but it does have over 100 subcommands, way more than any other source control system. If you're using it on a solo project, you're probably using 4-5. Don't worry, some day you'll get the dreaded 'octopus merge' error or some other non-intuitive message.
    - DamagedProperty 16y ago
      One thing git has done for me is think a bit about how I work and organize my code. I love the fact that I can work on a bunch of stuff then spend time organizing which parts are going to go into what commits. With me being the only one working on it does make it easier. I am proposing we use git at work so I would be interested in creating these 'octopus merge' situations.
makmanalp 16y ago
I'd like to see version control usage percent (or types used) divided up according to type of Operating System used.
glenjamin 16y ago
Perhaps it would be a good idea for the readers of HN to try and collaboratively design a VCS survey, and then distribute it among the general developer populace (in the hope of gaining a large sample). A quick google indicates http://www.surveypirate.com/ http://www.surveypirate.com/ as a tool which would allow large numbers of responses for free, or perhaps google documents. First step would be some questions though. EDIT: The OP has been updated to solicit responses from anyone visiting the page, which is pretty much what I was hoping for with this comment.
duvander 16y ago
For those who want to see what it looked like: http://yfrog.com/h7kypp http://yfrog.com/h7kypp
- las3rjock 16y ago
  Down now for TOS violation, but +1 anyway for the effort. Any chance of summarizing the infographic textually somewhere?

244 points by gecko 16y ago

Good to see that modern revision control systems are starting to gain on SVN. EDIT: Removed incorrect statement about 63% stat.

CaptainDecisive 16y ago
The 63% refers to people who dont use code review tools, not people who dont use version control.
carson 16y ago
That is 63% that don't do code reviews. I think it is put together oddly because I thought that as well at first but later in the description they talk about code reviews.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

brown9-2 16y ago

And, you'll be increasingly coming across Mercurial, since it's been adopted by Mozilla four years ago, by Google in 2009, and is preferred by Windows, Python, and Django developers. (89% of our respondents have heard of GitHub and 62% of its Mercurial sibling BitBucket.) "Adopted by Google" here seems a bit disingenuous; they offer Mercurial as an option for developers that want to host their OSS projects with Google, it isn't as if Google's in-house source control has moved to Mercurial.

reedlaw 16y ago
What do they use in-house?
- gecko 16y ago
  Perforce.
  - powdahound 16y ago
    I've heard that the server it runs on is the most powerful machine Google owns. Perforce can't be distributed and has to keep track of all the files that are opened by every user (p4 edit). Must be quite a beast.
    - mosburger 16y ago
      When I last used Perforce about five years ago, it did allow for read-only proxies to help reduce the load on the main server, particularly in environments where the developers were geographically dispersed. It worked quite well.
    - snprbob86 16y ago
      And when I was there a few years ago, it was also the slowest service with the most downtime. grumblegrumble* I hope that they have addressed that by now.
      - nostrademons 16y ago
        Nope, it's still basically that way. Well, Mondrian seems to have more downtime, but a lot of Mondrian outages are really Perforce outages that propagate down the stack.
    - mcbain 16y ago
      Both Google and Perforce have talked about the install from time to time - for example this 2007 paper: http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/34459.pdf http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/34459.pdf
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- tghw 16y ago

igneous4 16y ago

Bazaar is conspicuously missing. My guess is that "other" is mostly Bazaar. Aside: would've been neat to see a "version control by OS" pie chart for GNU/Linux.

gecko 16y ago
That's because it was conspicuously missing as an answer from our respondents.
laskito 16y ago
Don't forget Fossil
rm445 16y ago
If the survey was done properly, then 'other' consists of lots of different things and bzr is just a small chunk of it not worth dealing with separately. If the survey was done badly, with an 'other' option with no way to write in what you use, then potentially all of the 'other' block could be bzr. It would just be left out by the survey writer not having heard of it.
durin42 16y ago
I'm not so sure. All but one of the Bazaar users I know uses it only because Canonical and/or GNU* require it. * Emacs uses Bazaar for "branding" reasons IIRC.
alkaramba 16y ago
We got exactly four responses for Bazaar and one for Fossil out of nearly a thousand. They are just tiny in comparison to the rest.
- riffraff 16y ago
  given that 'others' does not seem to be 0.5% of the chart: what else is in there?
  - stonemetal 16y ago

pclark 16y ago

Out of 1000 respondents: > 70% of programmers today are Windows based, 16% use Ubuntu/CentOS or other Linux, and 14% use Mac OS Is this a skewed survey towards Microsoft orientated people, or is this the normal for the developer industry? (hard to say when you are in a bubble/niche of web startups)

gecko 16y ago
This is probably skewed. We did our best to make sure we were getting a wide swath of respondents by also running the survey on StackOverflow, but even there, our choice of which tags to advertise the survey with probably biased the results. I'd take the OS distribution not as an indication of who in general developers for which OS, but rather just as information on which percentage of respondents were on which OS. I.e., it tells you about the survey, not about developers in general.
- technomancy 16y ago
  Stackoverflow itself seemed pretty Windows-centric last I looked at it. Makes sense considering it was launched by two prominent Windows developers.
  - statictype 16y ago
    For some time, when Apple had its goofy NDA on the iPhone SDK when it was first released, Stackoverflow was probably the best site to get CocoaTouch related help. It's still a pretty decent resource for iPhone development.
- streeter 16y ago
  I'm not as convinced this is terribly skewed away from the normal. Outside the Bay Area, the large organizations that hire thousands of programmers primarily use Windows for development. For example, go to any Defense Contractor (Lockheed, Northrop, etc) in the country and sample the computers they use for dev work. Each developer probably has a Windows box they do everything on. There might be some Linux boxes mixed in, but those will probably be headless. Or the developer runs Linux in a VM on top of Windows. While in the Bay Area, we might think these are skewed because everywhere we go we see Mac laptops, in reality, the employees at big corporations are going to outnumber us.

snowwindwaves 16y ago

They state in the last paragraph that Ubuntu+CentOS+Other Linux OS market share in the survey was 16% which puts it ahead of OSX but they chose to separate Other Linux out in the chart so visually it doesn't seem as significant. Maybe I'm used to always reading Linux market share at 1% so I want to see that big circle even if it is from a non-representational group.

yannickmahe 16y ago

A fascinating read. HgInit.com is the site that got me to Mercurial. I now use it for all my personnal projects. Unintended side-effect though: pains with working with SVN at my day job became more obvious.

bradleyland 16y ago

"We asked subscribers to our developer newsletter (788 respondents) and professional developers via StackOverflow (169 respondents)." With all due respect to the FogCreek team, I'm not sure these numbers could be considered a representation of the development community in general. FogCreek makes Kiln, which according to Joel's (FogCreek CEO) blog is "a web-based version control and code review system based on Mercurial and tightly integrated with FogBugz." I know Joel's writing has broad appeal (I know I'm a fan), but it would stand to reason that there would be a disproportionately high number of Hg users in these results, would it not?

jfm3 16y ago
Amen. Whenever I read a joel-on-software or FogCreek blog post, I feel like I'm being exposed to a clever advertisement, where the clever factor decreases linearly over time. This isn't the first time I've seen appeal-to-authority arguments, bad statistics, or other dubious rhetoric there.
tghw 16y ago
We compared the numbers we got from our newsletter survey and those we got from Stack Overflow and they were actually much closer than even we expected. Mercurial gets a slight bump in our newsletter responses, but SVN still dominates across the board.
- xbryanx 16y ago
  And if you look at questions on Stack Overflow you've got: 532 tagged [Git] 119 tagged [Mercurial] Just to give you a (unscientific) sense of the bias in the Stack Overflow community.
  - sgift 16y ago
    I think this metric is not really useful: Maybe git is just harder to use (no git/mercurial please, just my first thought on the usage of question tags as a - unscientific - metric).

MatthewPhillips 16y ago

Personally I use github for projects I want to link to on my resume and bitbucket for websites and stuff I don't want to share with the world (yet). Maybe it's because I'm a novice user who only does the basic commands, but I see no real difference between git and mercurial. I use TFS in my professional job and am pretty surprised that so many people like it. Everyone I work with either hates it or lives with it. Doing stuff like moving changes from one branch to another is unreasonably hard.

billybob 16y ago
Scott Chacon (author of Pro Git, Git evangelist for Github) has said in his Changelog interview that Git and Mercurial are in fact extremely similar. He wrote some kind of tool for letting the two work together, so he had to learn the internals of both to do so. His take was, use either one. Just make sure you use distributed version control.
boyter 16y ago
I work with TFS (migrating to it and some things on it already) and I hate working with it. Every single thing it does is a little bit worse then the tools its replacing in my case. The out of the box diff sucks, its slow, buggy, get latest dosn't, commits sometimes just fail to commit, the CI builds fail for random reasons, the ticketing system only lets you remove time from tasks (not track them). Its stupid you have to use Visual Studio, Shell Extensions AND command line just to make it work correctly. Anyone considering moving to TFS better seriously consider their needs before doing it. If you are purely a MS shop, are prepared to spend days fighting the tool, or are happy to go with the defaults, and have big beefy servers sitting around doing nothing then consider TFS. Otherwise go SVN Jira Fisheye and Crucible. Trust me it will be better and cheaper.

jcromartie 16y ago

The infographic makes it look like half of VSS users love it. But later on, the article states that zero VSS users said they loved it.

yock 16y ago
Right, I was wondering about that too. Same for CVS.
MartinCron 16y ago
I think the response options were more than just love/hate, and that the infographic is representing that about half of the VSS users are "meh".
gecko 16y ago
For each VCS, you had to pick between love, like, meh, bleh, and ptooey (I don't remember the exact word options). The infographic attempts to just merge those into degree-of-like, which I believe was done by assigning weights to passion and then averaging.
- ohashi 16y ago
  I think you missed the point. The graphic doesn't effectively communicate the underlying data. I was also thrown by the graphic and words. 3 hearts/stars/whatever to me means average. Zero people saying they love a system to me indicates less than average. I don't fault you for trying to communicate it the way you did, it makes sense from one perspective, but from a user standpoint it's confusing when combined with the text.
  - gecko 16y ago
    Personally, I agree. I know our graphics designer whipped up one of the actual bell curve per VCS. Hopefully, we'll post it later.

jsdalton 16y ago

The article mentions Kiln (http://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/ http://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/) as a code review tool. What other code review/collaboration tools are people using with Git and/or Mercurial?

markstahler 16y ago
Reviewboard http://www.reviewboard.org/ http://www.reviewboard.org/
xiongchiamiov 16y ago
GitHub's pull requests work pretty nicely for code review.

mberning 16y ago

I don't understand our obsession with version control systems. I still find that SVN meets my needs 95% of the time. I've used git for my projects that are hosted on heroku, but I've never been so impressed with it that I want to completely move to git.

dpritchett 16y ago
How many people are working on your projects? Remember that Linus created git to scratch his own itch in managing patch submissions to the Linux kernel. If you've got squillions of people you don't know working 24/7 around the globe to come up with patches to your C-based system, then git was designed for you. If you're a one- or two-man team who svn merges twice a day, you might not care. Spolsky did a decent job outlining the headaches that DVCS is designed to solve: http://hginit.com/ http://hginit.com/
xbryanx 16y ago
As someone whose duties include branch management and team happiness, moving the DVCS has been a revolution. Improved my job happiness significantly.
patio11 16y ago
So I started using git with my latest project, just to get a feel for what all the Ruby on Rails guys were talking about when they weren't bragging about the size of their Macbooks. The koolaid is delicious. Even in a one-man, one-repo world, I spend a lot less time fighting my VCS for dominance. Example from today: I was working on my deploy branch, where I typically only make to-be-deployed-within-the-hour microchanges. Then I saw another bug, so I squashed it. Commit. Then I saw another bug. So I squashed it. Commit. Then I saw a major opportunity for a simplification with a refactoring. Then I realized the refactoring was under-tested and that failures would be catastrophic, so I started adding extra tests. Now I'm fifteen commits past the last deploy, I have code that I'm 85% positive works on my must-not-fail deploy branch, there is one commit in there which addresses a bug which I want dead, and it is quitting time. I have been in this state in SVN before. Recovery is NOT fun. git branch all-the-work-i-did-today #Creates a new branch whose history looks exactly like deploy's does. git reset --hard production_deploy_92 #Moves head of deploy branch to the tag of the last deploy, essentially forgetting commits afterwards. git cherry-pick carefully_copy_pasted_hash #Nabs the one bug fix that I really wanted to deploy today. Git makes my development and deployment processes better. Transformatively better, in some cases.

zdw 16y ago

I wonder how much further along git would be on Windows if it had run better on that platform historically, and had a better GUI. The Mac numbers don't surprise me at all, as the large influx of unix people to the platform are more used to using CLI tools. (yes, I'm saying that on the whole, Mac users are less afraid of the CLI than Windows users. Shocker!)

cincinnatus 16y ago
Yes, GIT is way more hassle than it should be. I hate that it depends on cygwin and msysgit is a great start but still a little alien feeling. I disagree with the blanket statement about Mac users. Developers using Mac are not Mac users by a long shot. For most of us I know it is a case of the Mac being a better *nix dev box than the alternatives.
- maw 16y ago
  I agree that many developers on Macs aren't traditional Mac users, but disagree that OSX is a better Unix. I'd say it's an ok-to-good Unix, but one where sound, copy and paste, and wireless networking all work--and that it's these that compensate for other shortcomings as compared to Linux or FreeBSD.
danssig 16y ago
Actually, I use Git on Mac and I switched because of GitX. I don't consider the CLI a legitimate interface personally.
- akavlie 16y ago
  Don't consider it a legitimate interface? Really? It's the interface git was designed for.
  - Johngibb 16y ago
    I find it way easier to visualize a diff in a gui. That's primarily what GitX brings to the party. For almost any feature other than git log and git commit, you still need to hit the CLI. (I DO think this means there's a great deal of potential profit available to someone who releases a GREAT git gui for OS X)

arn 16y ago

Does anyone else find it surprising that SlashDot is the highest ranked favorite tech website amongst respondents?

nkassis 16y ago
Not really, I think it's still the most popular. At least from my personal experience. It's mostly due to age I think. Reddit is slowly gaining I think but I know many people who've never heard of Reddit. Digg well I don't know if they still have fans anymore. HN hopefully will never outrank Slashdot. This is from an unscientific survey of my friends and coworkers.
Silhouette 16y ago
Personally I've all but given up posting on Slashdot and reading the discussions since their latest redesign a few weeks ago. I was sad to do so (I first hit the karma cap back when you could still see the numerical value, for those who want to judge my "Slashdot age") but it's just too tedious to navigate the comments and too buggy to interact at all now. I still find it a useful source of general geek interest articles, though. I've been posting more on HN recently, but I find HN links and discussions tend to fall sharply into three categories: general technical/business discussions between well-informed people, material about YC start-ups or other businesses that have no particular relevance to me, and flamefests that are full of people who think they know everything and clearly don't know much about anything. The first group is enough to justify my coming here. I'm trying to be better at ignoring the second and not feeding the trolls in the third. Reddit is a curious middle-ground, because of the subreddit system. I follow a few subreddits that generally have high quality content and one or two that are mostly lighthearted, and I ignore the rest, including most of the main ones. TechCrunch sometimes carries interesting news, but as with HN, a lot of it isn't particularly relevant to me and a significant amount is just the personal opinion/ego of whoever got to write on TechCrunch this week. Given this balance, it doesn't surprise me to see the relative popularity of the sites shown as it is in the infographic.
petercooper 16y ago
Given that 70% of the respondents are also using Windows, no. But it's a good thing, really. They're weeks behind with the latest news and decades behind with their operating systems.. we can't fail! :-)

smiler 16y ago

Biggest statistic is that 60% of people are not using source control professionally!!

simonista 16y ago
I think you misread. It's 63% of people not using code review professionally.
- smiler 16y ago
  Yes sorry, my mistake :|
shepting 16y ago
Actually, I think that was people not using code review tools professionally.

prosa 16y ago

Did anyone else notice the that the chart, "Do People Love or Hate their Version Control System?" was horribly misleading? CVS gets 3.5 hearts, and SVN gets nearly 4. Meanwhile, far below on the page: "Only 11% of Subversion users said that they loved using it; the number was zero for CVS and VSS."

gjm11 16y ago
I assume the survey had options like love / like / tolerate / dislike / loathe-with-the-fury-of-a-thousand-exploding-suns and the heart graphic was derived from some combination of those rather than just how many chose the "love" option. "Love or like", perhaps. [EDITED to add: actually, more likely an average score, like the ratings on Amazon.]
mnutt 16y ago
The hearts chart also bothered me in that the lines were diagonal making it difficult to compare at a glance.
fhars 16y ago
They were probably calculating the mean of a Likert scale, which is often coonsidered an analysis error.

yock 16y ago

> Only 11% of Subversion users said that they loved using it; the number was zero for CVS and VSS. Compare that to the over 40% of Mercurial and Git users that love using them! Is it just me or doesn't this not reconcile with the relevant portion of the graphic?

icefox 16y ago
Same with the "47% of developers use it as their primary version control system at work" Shouldn't that be more like ~20% given that the two pie charts for win/mac showed ~40 and ~15?
- yock 16y ago
  That seems to refer to Subversion, which seems to jive with the top bar graph.

asnyder 16y ago

No Darcs? Personally I prefer darcs over other distributed version control systems, unfortunately their tooling is somewhat behind and due to the github craze we're forced to use git on many projects,it's very sad as the ease, the features, and simplicity of darcs is in my opinion unparalleled by any of the others listed.

gjm11 16y ago
The last time I looked at darcs -- which, admittedly, was years ago -- there was a problem where, under certain poorly understood circumstances that tended to apply to most people with large repositories, performance would fall off a cliff, meaning IIRC that from then on, every merge could take hours. Or years -- I think it went exponential. The Wikipedia page about darcs says "Although the issue was not completely corrected in Darcs 2, exponential merges have been minimized." I wonder what "minimized" means here. On the face of it, this seems like a pretty compelling reason not to use darcs for anything important.
- asnyder 16y ago
  I haven't experienced that issue in years. I do remember the issues it had before, and thankfully they seem to have been addressed. I don't know how up to date the Wikipedia entry is, but to the best of my knowledge this issue has been resolved, especially if you use darcs2 formatted repos.
danssig 16y ago
I love Darcs conceptually and I used it for a few years but after moving to Git I have to say I prefer it. Darcs is certainly cleaner than how Git is actually implemented (scripts and perl everywhere) but Git is nicer to work with day to day. The reason is that in Darcs to make a branch you have to basically check out the tree again. In Git I never need more than my repo directory. All branch checkouts, etc. happen right in that directory. That may sound like a trivial difference but in practice this can save hours a week for the way I work. Git can do most of the cherry picking, etc. that Darcs can do. I do miss the ability to check in changes that I only ever want to have local though. I haven't found a satisfactory way to do that in Git yet.

famousactress 16y ago

I find it a bit surprising (if not hard to believe) that hg is more common than git in professional use. That said, I don't find it hard to believe that hg users have more love for their tool than git users.. Before becoming an avid git user I tried both and found hg's commands much more lucid.

statictype 16y ago
Git support on Windows was really poor for some time (I gather it has improved though), whereas Mercurial pretty much always treated Windows as a first-class citizen. That may have something to do with it. On the other hand, I do find it hard to believe that hg users love their tools more. Generally my impression has been that git attracts a lot of people who are, shall we say, passionate about their particular version control system.
- famousactress 16y ago
  Ahh.. The windows bit makes perfect sense. I wasn't aware (not a Windows user). Excellent point about git's community also. As obtuse as the commands can be (Really? git push :branch_name DELETES a remote branch?), I still love it. Also, the relatively high number of people who claim to love cvs in the survey suggests the bar for satisfaction might not be very high here :|
megaman821 16y ago
Why surprising? I find SVN still dominates but of those who have made the change to a DVCS the distance from SVN to Mercurial is less than SVN to Git.
- famousactress 16y ago
  Because the momentum behind git is huge. Like I said, I preferred hg at first glance and still ended up a git user because most of the people I wanted to work with were on-board and github is awesome.
  - 16y ago

frobozz 16y ago

I'm surprised at how loved perforce is. Whenever I have to do anything on a perforce repository I think, "Oh no, not this again!"

blasdel 16y ago
Sounds like you've never had to do anything with ClearCase, VSS, TFS, or any of those other abortions. Perforce may be a VCS for managers by managers, but at least it's a technically competent implementation of a bad idea.
- frobozz 16y ago
  No, I've suffered VSS, but that is quite rightly positioned at the bottom of the love/hate scale (IIRC. They've taken the image down). Perforce had just under 4 hearts out of 5, with Mercurial and Git being just over 4 out of 5.

paulgb 16y ago

Not to nitpick, but the "Most Used Operating System Professionally" portion misrepresents the data. The area should be proportional to the values, not the radius. Notice that the Windows XP circle is over 4X as big as the Mac OS one, even though it's only twice the value.

tghw 16y ago
Are you sure those aren't spheres? 'Cause if they were, then it should really be volume, not area.

kenjackson 16y ago

CVCSes work OK. But they all miss a critical piece. They aren't nearly as good at doing one of the main things that a version control system can let you do: branching and experimenting with your code I hear this complaint a lot, but I do this all the time with SVN. Just have a directory (tempbranches) where you create your branches. It's probably something I do once a week (and not because I feel limited to only doing it once per week, but most of my work occurs in my local branch -- and I branch that one only when I want to do something that is more experimental, but will take a few days). I'll grant that its not as clean as a DVCS for this, but it works just as easily. The big difference is that we now have centralized accounting of this action, rather than it being distributed.

famousactress 16y ago
but it works just as easily Um, are you sure? I find branching and merging in git (after three months using it) much, much, much easier than I did in SVN (after 7 years of using it).
- kenjackson 16y ago
  Can you expand. Because I've probably done a few hundred SVN branches. And probably 100 Git branches. The big advantage I had with Git was that since it is decentralized, you don't have branches on the server (so no need to have a tempbranch target on the server). But that doesn't seem like a huge deal to me. The actual activity of branching and merging seem equally easy to me.
  - famousactress 16y ago
    Relatively unscientific, but git merges feel smarter. It notices when I've moved a file (without telling it I did), and I experience fewer conflicts that I was used to. Some possible suggestions as to why here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5035531/how-is-dvcs-git-mercurial-branching-and-merging-support-better-than-svns http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5035531/how-is-dvcs-git-m... Also, the fact that commits have an atomic life is useful. If I cherry pick a change into a branch and then later merge it, Git generally knows what's up. With SVN this sort of scenario seemed to confuse things. Another advantage to this model is that it's very easy to compare (what commits differ between these, instead of a big code diff). The differences may be subtle, but all in all I find myself much happier and more likely to use branches than I used to.

zinssmeister 16y ago

for http://www.virtualrockstars.com http://www.virtualrockstars.com I am using SVN, simply because that's what I used before and I didn't know of Git being so awesome at the time. But I must say SVN is still pretty good... I agree that you can't love it compared to Git but its pretty pretty good.

haberman 16y ago

I'm becoming less enamored with git over time. I've used it for years (by choice, and I'm a GitHub user), but have never been a power user. I'm annoyed at how the very most basic workflows in Git seem awkward, like I'm working against the tool instead of with it. The simplest example is: I have a hacked-up tree, but I know changes have been made upstream, and I want to pull those changes: $ git pull Updating 73f91c3..0ee9fa8 error: Entry 'README' not uptodate. Cannot merge. It's complaining because I've modified README locally, which was also modified remotely. Every other reasonable version control system I've ever used will happily merge the upstream changes with my not-yet-committed local changes. But Git refuses. This is annoying. What I have to do now is commit my hacked-up, non-compiling, possibly-swear-word-containing in-progress changes. I really dislike this. To me, "commit" means "take a finished bit of work and add it to the global history." I really dislike having to commit something that is extremely unfinished just because I wanted to integrate some upstream changes. So what I usually do in this situation is "git stash", "git pull", "git stash apply." This works ok for the "pull" case. But what if I have multiple sets of locally-hacked-up changes? Like suppose I was working on one change when I realized that there's something else I should really fix first. "git stash" quickly becomes limiting, since you can't name the individual changes, so you get this list of changes that you don't know what they are or what branch/commit they were based on. In other VCS's like Perforce, you can have multiple sets of independent changes in your working tree. Not possible with Git AFAIK. Anyway, I'll probably keep using Git, but I'm not as enamored with it as I once was. I used to figure this was all just porcelain issues that would be refined over time, but it doesn't seem to be getting any better.

mseebach 16y ago
It seems that what you're really hitting is the, erhm, ill-advised decision to name most of git's most common actions the same as actions in subversion, but make them do significantly different things. Git's "commit" should probably have been named "mark" or whatever because "push" is what's actually comparable to a subversion commit. I've mostly conditioned myself by now, but I also recall some fun with checkout.
- haberman 16y ago

amitraman1 16y ago

The learning curve on git is high, but I understand the benefits. We use it at my current company , but we do make mistakes with it. Windows + SVN is so easy to use (and so entrenched), I'd recommend to new developers & students to learn SVN.

DamagedProperty 16y ago
Can you explain why the learning curve on git is high? I have been using it for a couple of months after SVN completely dorked my project. I have not found git hard to use. What aspect of git is hard to learn?
- kgo 16y ago
  I like git just fine, but it does have over 100 subcommands, way more than any other source control system. If you're using it on a solo project, you're probably using 4-5. Don't worry, some day you'll get the dreaded 'octopus merge' error or some other non-intuitive message.
  - DamagedProperty 16y ago
    One thing git has done for me is think a bit about how I work and organize my code. I love the fact that I can work on a bunch of stuff then spend time organizing which parts are going to go into what commits. With me being the only one working on it does make it easier. I am proposing we use git at work so I would be interested in creating these 'octopus merge' situations.

makmanalp 16y ago

I'd like to see version control usage percent (or types used) divided up according to type of Operating System used.

glenjamin 16y ago

Perhaps it would be a good idea for the readers of HN to try and collaboratively design a VCS survey, and then distribute it among the general developer populace (in the hope of gaining a large sample). A quick google indicates http://www.surveypirate.com/ http://www.surveypirate.com/ as a tool which would allow large numbers of responses for free, or perhaps google documents. First step would be some questions though. EDIT: The OP has been updated to solicit responses from anyone visiting the page, which is pretty much what I was hoping for with this comment.

duvander 16y ago

For those who want to see what it looked like: http://yfrog.com/h7kypp http://yfrog.com/h7kypp

las3rjock 16y ago
Down now for TOS violation, but +1 anyway for the effort. Any chance of summarizing the infographic textually somewhere?