Git User Survey 2010 Analysis | Hacker News Reader

Git User Survey 2010 Analysis

git.wiki.kernel.org

26 pointsMorendil7 comments

Wow, over 77% of surveyed Git users use Github! What incredible traction! Congrats!

It's worth pointing out (as the linked page does) that the survey was announced prominently on GitHub (and wasn't on some other Git hosting sites), so those results might be skewed.

(Either way though, they clearly do have a ton of very well-deserved mindshare. GitHub one of the very few services I find to be worth paying for. I wouldn't be nearly as attached to Git as I am if GitHub didn't exist.)

Why not?

Hosting your own Git repository is not an overly complicated affair, and even if GitHub did not exist, what would be the lure of an alternate content repository mechanism?

As far as I've been able to tell, Git, Mercurial, and Bazaar are relatively close to each other in terms of features. I'm pretty sure I could use any of them and be happy. It's the fact that GitHub is by far the best code-hosting site I've used (and that the alternatives, as far as I can tell, don't compare) that keeps me using Git.

True, you can host your own repo with just `git init`!

But, Github really handles the social element of code well. I really like how they encourage forking & collaboration.

They also provide an issue tracker, wiki, and some webpage functionality. All easy to duplicate, but it's even more trivial to sign up for a github account.

This is they key point. Github has made contributing to opensource projects as simple as following someone on twitter.

Think about that for a minute. Forget which dvcs tool they're using. You want to know why launchpad and bitbucket don't have the same uptake? It's not the tool. It's the fact that, as a maintainer, I can easily accept contributions from anyone who wants to submit a pull request. As an end user, I can IMMEDIATELY start hacking on some project with a simple click of the "fork" button.

THAT is the power of Github.

Only half of surveyed users use “shell completion of commands”. It’s useful (e.g. autocompletion of branch names), but doesn’t come with the default Git distribution (at least on OS X). I expect this to change as a result of this survey.

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