Re: FYI: VCS choice these days

[Osamu Aoki <osamu@debian.org>]

Hi,

I did not mean to say that VCS in low numbers are unpopular.  Instead, my
message should be understood as there are many popular VCSs and
popularity of use is moving.

On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 10:27:40PM +0200, Michal Čihař wrote:
> Dne Wed, 21 May 2008 15:10:14 -0500
> Steve Greenland <steveg@moregruel.net> napsal(a):
> 
> > FWIW, and I'm not sure it actually conflicts or invalidates or even
> > causes questions of the popcon data, but installs, at least, may not
> > mean that much. On my main home box, several years old now, I've got all
> > of cvs, svn, rcs[1], mercurial, git, and bzr installed, because at one
> > point or another I've need to grab source from a repository that used
> > that particular tool. Currently I only *use* mercurial. 

Then you are voting for mercurial if you participated in popcon.

  vote: number of people who use this package regularly;

This "vote" is more important for executable packages here.

The large "installed" with low "vote" may be indication that people has
found some new good alternative for a popular tool of yesterday.
   (RCS -> DVCS such as git, mercurial, ...)

1/3 of people installed mercurial actually uses it while 1/5 people
installed RCS actually uses it.  That is interesting to me.

> Well, popcon is not probably best source of such information, but there
> is hard to find better one. For me, I have installed cvs, svn, bzr,
> git and darcs (at least, I did not really check, but these I use
> regularly), most of them just because I have to use them in some
> projects...

Then you are voting for all :-)

Shorter summary of vote data goes as:

cvs           5%
subversion    9%
git-core      3%
mercurial     0.6%
darcs         0.3%
bzr           0.3%

You can say mercurial and bzr has significant user base.  There are many
useful packages in 0.1% vote range.

6 month ago, cvs was at around 10% and subversion was about 5% and git
was about 1% as I vaguely remember.  (Debian web and DDP have switched
from cvs to subversion during this time.)

At the same time, most machine (>80%) does not use any VCS recently.

Nothing to be excited.  Just facts.

I use git locally these days and use subversion, cvs, git, and bzr as I
need to access upstream.   Mercurial and darcs seem interesting but did
not have time to learn yet.

Osamu