DVCS Survey Summary
Summary
A long time ago (December of 2011), I sent out a brief survey on DVCS usage to Mozilla folks (and asked them to spread wider). While there were only 42 responses, there were some interesting patterns.
Disclaimer!
I am neither a statistician nor a psychometrician.
I believe you can see the raw summary at via this link. What follows are the informal inferences I drew from the results (remember the disclaimer).
Commit to git is not the issue:
Git is not the issue:
- The number of “passionate for git” is about equal to “passionate for hg” (small survey size).
- One respondent volunteered [1] that he found git very difficult to explain to new community members, others felt the opposite.
The Issue Is…
The issue is some level of official support of social coding sites:
- 86% mentioned “pull requests” as a better review process than patch submittal.
- A number of volunteered comments expressed some level of confusion, including which github repo to use, how to start a new project, what workflows to use to interact with hg.m.o, etc.
A Plan
These survey results, plus some technical investigation into what was possible with given tools, led to forming the (very agressive) 2012 Q1 goal captured in bug 713782. A looser summary of that follows.
End the confusion!
- Provide an officially supported repositories for releng supported prodcuts on github & bitbucket
- Coordinate tooling to allow git to work with hg.m.o
- Document “how to set up git to work with releng” [2]
Prepare for disaster
- ensure every releng supported product has an inside-the-firewall repository of record.
Notes
| [1] | When the survey allowed text input, and responses were specific beyond the question, I count that as a “volunteered” answer of greater “weight” than a checkbox response. |
| [2] | There are several categories of Mozilla source code on github: Product code, SAAS code, and experimental code are the big ones. The scope of these recomendations is only for product code that will be built, tested, and released by the releng machinery. |