The first Mercurial user survey

BryanOSullivan [http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2006-April/007513.html announced a user survey] in mid-April 2006. On April 26, he collated the results and posted them.

Who responded

We received 63 responses, from 20 countries.

As is usually the case with surveys, we don't know how many users Mercurial really has, or what the response rate was.

== Where users live ===

57 of 63 respondents (90%) answered.

Getting started

How people found out about Mercurial

56 of 63 respondents (88%) answered.

Interesting quotes:

• I work for a small company, and we were told that we needed to be SAS-70 compliant. This brought a lot of grief to the develpment team, since we realized that our current (svn) code handling was not up to par. This started our search, which came back pretty dry. Mercurial seemed to allow us to do many of the things we were hoping to be able to do with our source code.

• Ollivier Robert's [http://www.keltia.net/EuroBSDCon/paper.pdf paper on using Mercurial for FreeBSD development].

• I have to admit that I was lucky enough to attend a presentation by Matt at the OLS. Though the presentation was short (around an hour), it was more than enough to get me into it.

Was Mercurial easy to learn?

56 of 63 respondents (88%) answered.

Interesting quotes:

• Core concepts are very simple and you don't have to deal with something like darcs' "theory of patches".

• I've always thought that examples are the most helpful when it comes to learning an SCM
• I was up and ready to go with Mercurial in less than 5 minutes and even if my use of it was sometimes sporadic, it was always trivial to get back into it.
• Quite easy to use, a bit tricky to understand fully.
• Mercurial was extraordinarily easy to learn.

What was most helpful in learning it?

45 of 63 respondents (71%) answered.

Interesting quotes:

• It definitely helped to start using it for versioning my home directory

(or parts of it) and have it replicated across multiple machines.

• I wish there were more wiki tutorials, dealing with some of the more complex scenarios. I do an update -m, I screw up the merge (which I seem to do often), now what do I do to recover? What is the point of "update" without "-m"?
• I found the different switches to hg update especially confusing at first. Extensions are sparsely documented and I still can't master the regexes/globs/whatever on .hgignore and similar.
• The basics are easy, it's a bit more complicated for more advanced stuff and for new undocumented features.
• Basic usage was very easy, but setting up a server with multiple users and repositories, and actually using the distributedness is more complicated.
• By far, the most useful tool in learning what's going on is "hg view".
• The fact that the command-line syntax is similar to Subversion or CVS definitely helps.

How people use Mercurial

What do people use Mercurial for?

54 of 63 respondents (85%) answered.

Interesting quotes:

• I like Mercurial so much that I even use it when developing patches against projects still using things like CVS (thanks to [http://www.darcs.net/DarcsWiki/Tailor Tailor]).

How do people obtain Mercurial?

56 of 63 respondents (88%) answered.

Interesting quotes:

• Distributions' packages lag too far behind.

What systems do people use?

56 of 63 respondents (88%) answered.

How many people do users collaborate with?

48 of 63 respondents (76%) answered.

Interesting quotes:

• hg serve is incredibly useful for short hacking sessions with another person

What sizes of repositories do people work in?

50 of 63 respondents (79%) answered.

|| 13 || < 10mb || || 33 || < 100mb || || 8 || < 1gb || || 2 || < 10gb || || 1 || < 100gb ||