BryanOSullivan announced a user survey in mid-April 2006. On April 26, he compiled the results and posted them. Thanks to everyone who participated!

For a short-form report that contains the conclusions drawn from this report, please see UserSurveyConclusions.

About this report

This is a detailed summary of all of the responses we received. Where appropriate, we present tables of numeric responses. We also provide a representative selection of quotes from people's responses, to give a flavour of what Mercurial's users have to say. We have tried to avoid selecting only "positive" or "negative" quotes, instead trying to provide an informative view of responses.

If you responded to the user survey, but do not find an identifiable quote of something you said, please understand that we really did read everything you wrote.

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.

20

usa

8

france

5

uk

4

germany

2

canada, brazil, austria, australia

1

united arab emirates, switzerland, sweden, spain, russia, netherlands, mexico, japan, israel, czech republic, croatia, belgium

Getting started

How people found out about Mercurial

56 of 63 respondents (88%) answered.

18

read discussions on the Linux kernel mailing list

8

started using Mercurial because the Xen project uses it

8

discovered Mercurial during research via the net (typically Google)

5

found out via friends, coworkers, or collaborators

4

read articles or blog postings that mentioned Mercurial

3

saw Mercurial mentioned on the git mailing list

Interesting quotes:

Was Mercurial easy to learn?

56 of 63 respondents (88%) answered.

50

very easy

4

moderately easy

Interesting quotes:

What was most helpful in learning to use Mercurial?

45 of 63 respondents (71%) answered.

18

wiki pages, including tutorial

5

command help

2

README file

Interesting quotes:

How people use Mercurial

What do people use Mercurial for?

54 of 63 respondents (85%) answered.

43

work (paid) projects

50

unpaid, open source, and personal projects

Interesting quotes:

How do people obtain Mercurial?

56 of 63 respondents (88%) answered.

27

pull main

27

prebuilt binaries

24

source tarball

8

pull crew

Interesting quotes:

What systems do people use?

56 of 63 respondents (88%) answered.

28

i386 (cpu)

16

debian

14

linux (distro unspecified)

14

mac os x

13

windows

11

x86_64 (cpu)

9

fedora

9

ubuntu

7

freebsd

5

powerpc (cpu)

5

solaris

4

sparc (cpu), rhel, gentoo

3

suse

2

netbsd, centos

1

red hat 7, mips (cpu), mandriva, irix, dragonfly bsd

How many people do users collaborate with?

48 of 63 respondents (76%) answered.

12

solo projects only

17

3-8 people

11

1-2

6

9-16

2

17+

Interesting quotes:

What sizes of repositories do people work in?

50 of 63 respondents (79%) answered.

33

10-100mb

13

1-10mb

8

0.1-1gb

4

0-1mb

2

1-10gb

1

10-100gb

How many projects do people use Mercurial with?

52 of 63 respondents (82%) answered.

23

3-8 projects

16

1-2

12

9+

Which extensions do people use?

47 of 63 respondents (74%) answered.

21

none

14

hgk

12

mq

8

patchbomb

3

hbisect

3

gpg

Interesting quotes:

What do people think of Mercurial?

How happy are people with Mercurial?

56 of 63 respondents (88%) answered.

Note: the original question didn't ask for a numeric score, so these values are approximations based on the levels of enthusiasm expressed.

20

8 out of 10

18

7

16

9

1

6

Interesting quotes:

What other SCMs did people mention?

21

cvs

14

svn

11

arch

10

git

6

monotone

5

darcs

4

perforce

3

bzr

2

teamware

How does Mercurial compare to other SCMs?

53 of 63 respondents (84%) answered.

Interesting quotes:

What do people like most about Mercurial?

54 of 63 respondents (85%) answered.

27

performance

14

simplicity

12

ease of use

8

lightweight

6

distributed

5

python

4

portability

4

good community and developers

3

branching

3

documentation

Interesting quotes:

What would people most like to see improved?

55 of 63 respondents (87%) answered.

16

merge across rename

10

better docs

5

collapse commits

4

cherry picking

3

cvs keywords

3

fix more bugs

3

push over http

2

partial checkouts

2

truncated history

Interesting quotes:

What could we do to see wider use of Mercurial?

49 of 63 respondents (77%) answered.

Interesting quotes:

Documentation

Do people use the wiki?

55 of 63 respondents (87%) answered.

49

yes

4

no

Do people find the wiki useful?

50 of 63 respondents (79%) answered.

35

yes

7

somewhat

5

no

Interesting quotes:

Do people find Mercurial's built-in help useful?

49 of 63 respondents (77%) answered.

32

yes

10

somewhat

4

no

Interesting quotes:

What are people's favourite pieces of user documentation?

41 of 63 respondents (65%) answered.

6

svnbook

5

python

4

texinfo docs

3

apache

3

freebsd handbook

3

emacs

2

bash man page

Other mentions:

Interesting quotes:

Getting help

Have users tried to get help from other people?

50 of 63 respondents (79%) answered.

30

yes

20

no

Interesting quotes:

Have people been successful in getting help from others?

25 of 63 respondents (39%) answered.

20

yes

2

somewhat

1

no

Interesting quotes:

Have people used the bug database?

52 of 63 respondents (82%) answered.

37

no

15

yes

Interesting quotes:

Do people find the bug database useful?

12 of 63 respondents (19%) answered.

7

yes

3

no

2

somewhat

Interesting quotes:

Do people subscribe to the mailing list?

54 of 63 respondents (85%) answered.

48

yes

10

no

Interesting quotes:

Do subscribers find the mailing list useful?

36 of 63 respondents (57%) answered.

29

yes

1

no

Interesting quotes:

Open forum

Interesting quotes:


CategoryHistorical

UserSurvey (last edited 2010-10-21 23:30:00 by mpm)