VCS tools' popularity (was: Bazaar as interface to Subversion repositories)

[Teemu Likonen]

Russel Winder (2008-11-01 07:37 +0000) wrote:

> PS Actually I am keeping both Git repositories (on GitHub) and Bazaar
> branches (on Launchpad) of all the Subversion stores I am involved
> with (all from Codehaus). I get more Bazaar bundles as change requests
> than Git patches! It seems then that despite the Git hype and
> hullabaloo, Bazaar is often the tool of choice!

Popularity is difficult to measure and there aren't very reliable
statistics about it. We can of course look at the number and size of
known projects using certain VCS tool and perhaps do some guesses about
tools' popularity.

Debian have their own package-based popularity contest system.
Previously there were even per-package graphs (with time axis) but they
are currently unavailable. Anyway, here are some numbers. These are
about Debian GNU/Linux users only. There are two categories: (1) number
of installations and (2) number of users who use the package regularly.
The latter is called "vote" in popcon-speak and it's measured by
checking if the "atime" value of package's executable files (e.g.,
/usr/bin/bzr, /usr/bin/git) has been updated recently.


    | package    | installations | regular use |
    |------------+---------------+-------------|
    | subversion |         22826 |        8480 |
    | git-core   |          5893 |        3255 |
    | mercurial  |          2709 |         633 |
    | bzr        |          1647 |         402 |
    |------------+---------------+-------------|

    http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=subversion
    http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=git-core
    http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=mercurial
    http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=bzr