Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

["James Henstridge" <james jamesh id au>]

On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 2:57 PM, Elijah Newren <newren gmail com> wrote:
>> It's a shame that hackers who contribute to GNOME projects which don't
>> use svn.gnome.org were excluded.
>>
>>        (I was told their opinions didn't matter. {shrug} that's fine,
>>        so long as nobody tries to represent this survey as "what GNOME
>>        hackers think")
>
> How would you draw the line?  Who should be included and who
> shouldn't?  And how do we contact them all?  I think doing a survey of
> any group other than those with svn commit access would be practically
> unmanageable...and far more likely to be suspected of
> non-representative-ness [New word!].

I'd hope that any DVCS would get a larger user base than current list
of active Subversion committers: anyone who contributes patches via
mailing lists or bugzilla could use a DVCS the same way as a core
developer.  The same could go for anyone who does distribution
packaging.

At the same time, there are reasons not to value their input to the
same extent as core developers:
1. some proportion of them will continue to work with patches no
matter what VCS is in use.
2. it is difficult to predict what proportion will use DVCS features.
3. those without svn access probably don't hack on the code as much

As it is, there isn't much way to tell whether the answers from this
group mirror those of committers or not.

James.