Are there any popularity / usage statistics available for the Free RCS/SCM/VCS systems?

version-control survey popularity
Peter Boughton picture Peter Boughton · May 19, 2009 · Viewed 10.8k times · Source

Are there any surveys anywhere which report on number of projects and/or people using the assorted Free version control systems?

Also interesting is if a similar survey was one over time, to see how things have changed.

Obviously, it's hard to measure this sort of thing completely accurately, but it should still be possible to get reasonable estimates.


Since tags are annoyingly limited to five items, and I didn't want a bias towards/against any of the systems, for search purposes I'll add the following: bazaar bzr cvs git hg mercurial rcs scm svn subversion vcs scm vcs popularity survey statistics
update: Very few views so far, so I'm cycling the tags to contain the main tags for each software, which might get more eyes on it. If only I could just put all the tags together!

Answer

Jakub Narębski picture Jakub Narębski · May 20, 2009

Git User's Surveys (2006, 2007 and 2008) did contain version about other SCMs... but this is of course biased. You can check how many people have given SCM in stack at Ohloh, open source software metric site, but I think you can check only current state. There are also results of Debian Popularity Contest (popcon); you can even find some popcon graphs somewhere; here I am not sure whether one can get historical information.

Neither of those sources is a good solution, but I think it is a start...

Added 20-05-2009:
There is also GNOME DVCS Survey results analysis (with links to raw data) on Elijah Newren’s blog (DVCS = Distributed Version Control System).

Added 28-05-2009:
There is Survey on Decentralized Version Control Systems by Brian de Alwis of Department of Computer Science in the University of Saskatchewan being run (see this announcement on Mercurial and Git mailing lists).

Related questions

How do I undo the most recent local commits in Git?

I accidentally committed the wrong files to Git, but didn't push the commit to the server yet. How can I undo those commits from the local repository?

Read More
How do I delete a Git branch locally and remotely?

I want to delete a branch both locally and remotely. Failed Attempts to Delete a Remote Branch $ git branch -d remotes/origin/bugfix error: branch 'remotes/origin/bugfix' not found. $ git branch -d origin/bugfix error: branch 'origin/bugfix' not …

Read More
How do I force "git pull" to overwrite local files?

How do I force an overwrite of local files on a git pull? The scenario is the following: A team member is modifying the templates for a website we are working on They are adding some images to the images …

Read More