I just wanted to point out explicitly, as several have hinted, that this survey isn’t a technical comparison of DSVNs amongst unbiased responders, but rather a highly biased referendum on the perceived merits of switching.

But then, that’s exactly the point. So, well done! Good survey!

I think the graph people should be taking most note of is the “Regular use of DVCSs”, since it’s a history-based question rather than opinion-based. 50% of your ‘user base’ regularly uses GIT. Choosing a system that half of your base already knows is always going to be an easier transition than educating the larger majority in an unfamiliar system.

Asking what people actually do tends to give more useful answers than asking what they think.

Thanks for that stats link, and all the other stats under the same directory (http://www.gnome.org/~shaunm/survey/). They were quite helpful.

I have been contemplating Git over and over for the past few weeks. I did try it out for a brief session. Although they do say it came a long way, I found it lacking from a usability respective and shunned it immediately. However, as a mercurial user I did have to deal with a few things that Git solves, such as the staging area for example. I am thinking I am sold with Git, I will have to work with aliases for a while, maybe submit a patch to at least get mind reading abbreviations going like Hg has. I will use Git for one or two projects and see how it feels.

Second choices are always interesting, especially where there are two or more options which would naturally seem to go together. I’d expect those who ranked git, hg or bzr first to rank the other two before SVN, but it seems that this isn’t the case.

38% of people who ranked Git first preferred svn before bzr or hg, while 31% of bzr users felt the same way about svn over hg or git (although 45% chose git as a second choice, it is hard to explain why there is more than a few die hards who would prefer svn to the other distributed alternatives, given that their first choice isn’t really all that different.

Of those who regularly used git, 83% had it listed as their first choice, quickly tailing off to 0% only 1% ranking it 4th or 5th. For bzr, 71% of users ranked it as their first choice, with the dropoff following the same (scaled) pattern from there.

Of the 20 people who used both regularly, 50% preferred git vs 30% preferring bzr. Interestingly, 2nd choices for svn here were a slightly more realistic 20%.

I started this hoping it would put bzr in a more favorable light, as being someone who only very occasionally (never? can’t remember) contributes something to anything in the ecosystem, I personally prefer ease of use above all else. I think however that all my analysis can show is that people prefer what they already know above unknowns, even if they appear similar on the surface. It would be interesting to find out why the people who put svn in second place did so, and what could be done to improve the chosen vcs to change their minds.

@David: See http://blogs.gnome.org/newren/2007/11/17/adoption-of-various-vcses/ for at least one reason to not use svk.

@David: Did you even read the survey results? Sure, if we only asked for first choice from everyone and there wasn’t a clear leader, then we couldn’t realistically claim we knew what the “preferred” system of those polled were. However, (1) we asked for first, second, third, fourth, and fifth place rankings so we could look at other rankings and figure out what people would want, and (2) even if all people who chose bzr (78 people) or hg (38 people) or svn (151 people) for their first choice system had all voted for the same system they still wouldn’t have as many votes as those who picked git as their first choice (286 people).

Hope KDE will some day think about this too.