Re: [RFC v2] Git User's Survey 2008

Hi,

Jakub Narebski wrote:

This is second revision (version) of proposed questions 
for Git User's Survey 2008.

Great!

By the way, should the survey be divided in pages, or simply use
headers to divide survey into sections?

Divided pages have a psychological impact, they don't look much and you
can say "Almost there!" on each page.

But headers and one-page surveys have a big advantage for users that pay
for Internet access per time unit: they can go offline, answer the
questions, and go online again to submit the survey.

So I've scrolled across your test survey on survs.com and I think it
should be kept on one page. Looks nice and manageable.

Third, where to send survey to / where to publish information about the 
survey?

This question leads me to a question that could be put into the survey:

	Where have you read about this survey? (optional)
	[Free form]

Fourth, how long should the survey last?  When sending announcement we 
should say where notice about Git User's Survey 2008 should be taken 
down.  Last year the survey was meant to take three weeks, but was up 
longer.  I'm thinking about having it last a month, or a month and a
half, starting from September 1.

And lasting until 2008-10-10?  No, I do not really care.


So, some comments on the questions now:

About you

   xx. What country are you in?

"What country do you live in?" perhaps?

Getting started with GIT

   xx. How did you hear about Git?

There is a typo on survs.com (hear_d_).
Should this by the way be multiple choice?
I have heard about Git several times before I tried it.



I will only quote from survs.com now:

told by friend (word of mouth)

                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ? :) I think this should be removed

What other SCM did or do you use?
[..]
 custom ( ) ( ) ( )

custom?

20. Which porcelains / interfaces / implementations do you use?
 [ ] core-git

Uh, this is ambiguous.  Is this our git or some script on top of git?
In both cases, this should be clarified.

22. Which git web interface do you use for your projects/have installed?
(Web interfaces used by git hosting sites do not count[*])

[...]

(*) Unless of cours you are hosting some git hosting site

             ^^^^^^^^                                      ^
	     typo, but I'd rather do s/of cours //   and s/$/./ :-)

26. How often do you use the following forms of git commands
or extra git tools?

	Never | Rare | Often

                                     | Not yet, but sounds cool   ;-)

No no :-)

But I wonder if we could split the "Never" case into several cases with
reasons like:
 - Do not know.
 - Not yet needed.
 - Other (did not understand; tried but did not work; ...)

But this will perhaps bloat the question even more, so we should keep
"Never", though I think the reasons could be interesting.
Could some "Comments" field for question 26 help?


Some other comment: I dislike that there is *one* "Reset" button for
such matrix questions. But I guess you cannot change that?

28. Which of the following features do or did you use?

I think many of the possible replies have been used in several other
questions before, e.g. in 
 - 21. (gitk, git gui), 
 - 24. (git bundle),
 - 26/27. (git gui, gitk, git stash)
 - ...

But this question still seems to makes sense for:
 [ ] eol conversion (crlf)
 [ ] gitattributes
 [ ] reflog (ref@{23})
 [ ] shallow clone
 [ ] detaching HEAD   <- I think several people could have used that without knowing
 [ ] commit templates
 [ ] integration with IDE/editor
 [ ] non-default hooks

And btw:

[ ] working with dirty tree      <- Eh? Is this a feature?

Big thanks for your efforts,
  Stephan

-- 
Stephan Beyer [off-list ref], PGP 0x6EDDD207FCC5040F