[webkit-dev] UPDATED Re: Version control survey

Sat Mar 10 13:46:57 PST 2012

This survey is just meant to check what people are currently using to access the WebKit repository, it's not a preference poll for change. If we were deciding on making a change, we'd probably aim for rough consensus rather than voting. However, knowing what people currently use to access the repo is a relevant fact.

I have sympathy for your comments, but I don't want to make the survey overly fine-grained in judging different types of WebKit contributors.

In my opinion, the level of SVN use shown in both surveys indicates to me that we should probably keep supporting it, unless most of the SVN users would want to switch to Git. In particular, the second survey so far is showing that SVN use is somewhat higher among committers and reviewers than among the general population.

Regards,
Maciej

On Mar 10, 2012, at 1:20 PM, Oliver Hunt wrote:

> I do think that we should also be considering what the responders are doing -- eg. do you work mostly on the core engine (WebCore, JSC, etc) vs. platform specific engine work (eg. WebCore/platform/graphics/{cg,cairo,skia,backendofdoom}) vs. WebKit API stuff vs. release branching, etc
> 
> I think it would be worth tracking these differences for a number of reasons
> * There are a number of reviewers who don't do substantial amounts of work directly in the repo anymore, longterm apple and google contributors who no longer work exclusively on webkit (on that note do we want to have some kind of reviewer expiration?)
> * Fairly elitist, but surely the opinion of people who work on core engine tech should have more say than people working on the periphery: core engine work benefits _everyone_ so I feel more weight should be given there
> * The needs of a contributor are fairly strongly influenced by what they're doing -- people working on build release branches, etc frequently want to do the sorts of things that git is far better at than svn, but people just working on single monolithic patches seem to prefer  svn.
> * A problem we these kinds of survey is that they are inherently biased in favour of people who want change, people who don't tend to ignore them - I had basically been ignoring this thread because it was going on and on and on without actually adding any new information over the last git vs. svn debate, had done nothing to change my mind, etc - i feel that I am not alone in this kind of mental exhaustion (see http://webkitmemes.tumblr.com/post/19019677135/webkit-dev-this-week)
> 
> Finally: I use git-svn, it allows me to do everything that I want to do that git is meant to be good at, so I'm not sure why people keep saying that the choice is between sticking with svn, or making  everyone switch to git.  My counter argument to "git-svn is slow so we should all use git" is "git-svn is slow and this annoys me so i'm going to contribute patches to git to fix that".
> 
> --Oliver
> 
> On Mar 10, 2012, at 1:00 PM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> 
>> 
>> I will also post the results split out by contribution level once the survey closes.
>> 
>> Regards,
>> Maciej
>> 
>> On Mar 10, 2012, at 12:58 PM, Jon Lee wrote:
>> 
>>> Direct link to results: http://kwiksurveys.com/results-overview.php?surveyID=LODHNK_f6f04dad&mode=4
>>> 
>>> On Mar 10, 2012, at 12:49 PM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Hi folks,
>>>> 
>>>> I made a bad choice of survey site. They want to charge me to see more than 100 responses or to export the data, but they won't take my money. Sadness. Please try this survey instead, it will run through the 17th.
>>>> 
>>>> http://kwiksurveys.com?s=LODHNK_f6f04dad
>>>> 
>>>> Regards,
>>>> Maciej
>>>> 
>>>> On Mar 10, 2012, at 11:52 AM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> On Mar 10, 2012, at 10:56 AM, Ryosuke Niwa wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 10:05 AM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com> wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Unfortunately SurveyMonkey sucks and I can't give everyone access to live responses without paying them money. Current results:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> - 97 people have answered
>>>>>> - About 67% use Git only (this has been consistent throughout the survey)
>>>>>> - Aabout 20% use Subversion only
>>>>>> - About 13% use Git and Subversion
>>>>>> - No one checked "Other"
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> As far as contribution levels of the responders:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> - 37% are WebKit reviewers
>>>>>> - 25% are WebKit committers
>>>>>> - 25% are WebKit contributors (but presumably not committers or reviewers yet)
>>>>>> - 13% are not WebKit contributors
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Can we see the breakdown of git/svn users among reviewers & committers?
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I'm not certain if it's really useful to consider votes casted by non-contributors here since we're presumably not trying to decide which version control system is more popular in general public.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I would indeed like to get the contributor-only (and reviewer/committer-only) statistics, but I'm having trouble upgrading to the "pro" account that would enable this. I'll post the data once I have it.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I do think it is somewhat interesting to find out what non-contributors who nontheless check out source are using to access the WebKit repository. The fact that so many people use Git says to me that our basic checkout instructions should include the relevant git instructions as an alternative. SVN instructions are on the main site at <http://www.webkit.org/building/checkout.html> but Git instructions are buried in the wiki.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Regards,
>>>>> Maciej
>>>>> 
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