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The [2013 git-annex user survey](http://git-annex-survey.branchable.com/polls/2013/)
has been running for several weeks and around 375 people have answered
at least the first question. While I am going to leave it up through the
end of the year, I went over the data today to see what interesting
preliminary conclusions I can draw.
* 11% build git-annex from source. More than I would have guessed.
* 20% use the prebuilt versions from the git-annex website.
This is a number to keep in mind later, when more people have upgraded to
the last release, which checks for upgrades. I can run some stats on
the number of upgrade checks I receive, and multiplying that by 5 would
give a good approximation of the total number of computers running
git-annex.
* I'm surprised to see so many more Linux (79%) than OSX (15%) users.
Also surprising is there are more Windows (2%) than Android (1%) users.
(Android numbers may be artificially low since many users will use it in
addition to one of the other OSes.)
* Android and Windows unsurprisingly lead in ports requested, but the
Synology NAS is a surprise runner up, with 5% (more than IOS).
In theory it would not be too hard to make a standalone arm tarball,
which could be used on such a device, although IIRC the Synology had
problems with a too old linker and libc. It would help if I could make
the standalone tarball not depend on the system linker at all.
A susprising number (3%) want some kind of port the the Raspberry Pi, which
is weird because I'd think they'd just be using Raspbian on it.. but a
standalone arm tarball would also cover that use case.
* A minimum of 1664 (probably closer to 2000) git annex repositories are being
used by the 248 people who answered that question. Around 7 repositories
per person average, which is either one repository checked out on 7
different machines or two repositories on 3 machines, etc.
* At least 143 terabytes of data are being stored in git-annex. This does
not count redundant data. (It also excludes several hundred terabytes from
one instituion that I don't think are fully online yet.)
Average user has more than half a terabyte of data.
* 8% of users store scientific data in git-annex! :) A couple of users are
using it for game development assets, and 5% of users are using it for
some form of business data.
* Only 10% of users are sharing a git-annex repository with at least one
other person. 27% use it by themselves, but want to get others using
their repositories. This probably points to it needing to be easier for
nontechnical users.
* 61% of git-annex users have good or very good knowledge of git.
This question intentionally used the same wording as the
[general git user survey](https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitSurvey2012),
so the results can be compared. The curves have somewhat different
shapes, with git-annex's users being biased more toward the higher
knowledge levels than git's users.
* The question about how happy users are also used the same wording.
While 74% of users are happy with git-annex, 94% are similarly happy with
git, and a while the median git-annex user is happy, the median git user
is very happy.
The 10% who wrote in "very enthusiastic, but still often
bitten by quirks (so not very happy yet, but with lots of confidence in
the potential" might have thrown off this comparison some, but they
certianly made their point!
* 3% of respondants say that a bug is preventing them from using git-annex,
but that they have not reported the bug yet. Frustrating! 1% say that a
bug that's been reported already is blocking them.
* 18% wrote in that they need the webapp to support using github (etc)
as a central server. I've been moving in that direction with the
encryption and some other changes, so it's probably time to make a UI for
that.
* 12% want more control over which files are stored locally when using the
assistant.
* A really surprising thing happened when someone wrote in that I should
work on "not needing twice disk space of repo in direct mode", and 5% of
people then picked this choice. This is some kind of documentation
problem, because of course git-annex never needs 2x disk space, whether
using direct mode or not. That's one of its advantages over git!
* Somewhere between 59 and 161 of the survey respondants use Debian.
I can compare this with [Debian popularity contest data](http://qa.debian.org/popcon-graph.php?packages=git-annex)
which has 400 active installations and 1000 total installations,
and make guesses about what fraction of all git-annex users have answered
the survey. By making different assumptions I got guesses that varied by
2 orders of magnitude, so not worth bothering with. Explicitly asking how
many people use each Linux distribution would be a good idea in next
year's survey.
----
Main work today was fixing Android DNS lookups, which was trying to use
/etc/resolv.conf to look up SRV records for XMPP, and had to be changed to
use a getprop command instead. Since I can't remember dealing with this
before (not impossible I made some quick fix to the dns library before and
lost it though), I'm wondering if XMPP was ever usable on Android before.
Cannot remember. May work now, anyway...
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