Linus Torvalds [off-list ref] writes:
On Wed, 10 Aug 2005, Sebastian Kuzminsky wrote:
quoted
People still use GNU Interactive Tools. Not just crazy, stupid people,
and I bet not just Debian people.
Why do you say that?
Do you have anybody who actually does, or are you just claiming so?
Debian folks have a handy way to substantiate that claim or get
that claim proven wrong, and I am somewhat surprised that nobody
mentioned it so far.
Debian popularity contest (http://popcon.debian.org/).
Here is an excerpt I just made.
<name> is the package name;
<inst> is the number of people who installed this package;
<vote> is the number of people who use this package regularly;
<old> is the number of people who installed, but don't use
this package regularly;
<recent> is the number of people who upgraded this package recently;
rank name inst vote old recent
1 base-files 7147 6777 158 212
2 base-passwd 7147 6724 163 260
3 debianutils 7147 6739 120 288
4 sed 7147 6763 155 229
...
6591 git 114 24 83 7
...
25555 git-core 2 1 0 1 (Not in sid)
29939 cogito-scm 1 0 1 0 (Not in sid)
...
46416 zope2.6 0 0 0 0
-------------------------------------------------
46416 Total 6768849 2118048 2306009 595621
So yes, among 46.5K packages in the known universe, the other
git ranks 6600th. Does that mean it is popular? I dunno.
Obviously, not everybody who installs Debian participates in
popcon. The sample size of the above statistics is 7147
installations of base-files.
Among these 7147 sample installations, the other git was
installed by 114 people, and 24 people regularly use it.