Re: GNOME DVCS Survey Results

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi,

Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> Dave Neary wrote:
<snip>
>> This is only true if you don't believe that future contributions to the
>> GNOME base are dependent of the RCS we decide to host on gnome.org
>> (should we decide to host only one).
> 
> You are of course right.  I probably should also have added that "list of SVN
> users" is the only affordable way we could do a closed survey.  Simply because
> that's the only list we have.  The only other realistic alternative would have
> been a public survey with no authentication at all, and I hope we agree that
> that would have not been more representative than the survey we did.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to consider people with GNOME SVN
accounts for a survey. I don't think it's correct to characterise that
sample as the only people affected by the change.

How you find out about the opinion of others potentially affected by the
change, and the extent to which you consider their opinion, is a
separate question.

>> The question which we could ask in this case is: how many people are
>> contributing regularly to GNOME projects, and don't have an account on
>> GNOME SVN? And why don't they?
> 
> How do we do that objectively?  I can name 10 people that push code to fdo
> instead of GNOME because of their VCS preference.  The next guy can name 10
> that push to Launchpad for the same reason.  The promise of the survey was to
> give us solid numbers.  How do we do it for anything other than current
> account holders?


I don't believe there's a way to objectively do that. We have to live
with a bit of subjectivity, I'm afraid.

A start would be to see how many official GNOME modules have moved their
development off gnome.org - a bunch of GNOME maintainers are using
either bzr or git-svn these days - and ask them if there are any regular
contributors who don't have/want/need an account on gnome.org.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org