J5 mentioned in his post his interpretation of the number of users for GIT, Bazaar and Hg (Mercurial). He also finishes with "Converse amongst yourselves".
I guess I should first point out that I am a Bazaar user, and that I work for Canonical. I felt somewhat enraged at the post from J5, and have spent some time trying to work out some response.
John Carr mentioned that 83% of statistics are made up on the spot, and that cannot be more true here. I had been waiting for someone else to post the numbers that they saw at the BOF, but so far I have not seen one.
Here is my take on it.
Yes there were more GIT users than Bazaar users at the BOF, but the numbers were more like 50% of the audience were GIT users, and about 40% were Bazaar users. Someone piped up and said "What about Mercurial?" and so the question was asked, and there were about five or six people. There was an overlap of the GIT and Bazaar groups, and there was by far the larger majority of the audience that had not used any DVCS.
What conclusions can we draw from this? Not much. Many people attending the pre-conference work for larger companies, like Red Hat, Novell, and Nokia, and many of those people work on some hard core linux stuff, many of which have chosen GIT. Many have chosen GIT because that is what the linux kernel is using. Is that a good reason to chose a DVCS? I don't feel that we can really answer that question as I am sure there are strong advocates for both sides.
An interesting question is "Which DVCS is easier for the casual contributor to use?" Surely one of the reasons that a project chooses a DVCS is to allow for more community contributions in an easy to merge way that has a clear contribution history. Bazaar just works. It works for the hard-core developers, but is also easy for those soft-core (?).
From the people I talk to, and I've tried to talk to many here, is that of those that use Bazaar it just works. Bazaar doesn't get in your way of developing the software that you are working on. It is just a tool that works.
One final point. The questions were "Who uses <insert DVCS>?", not "Who likes/loves using <insert DVCS>?".
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My experience with Bazaar is a bit spotty. I hear claims it's ready to be used, I try to use it, it breaks down on me (tracebacks, internal errors and whatnot). I file bugs, wait a few months and the cycle starts again. I've been through three of these cycles by now, and view "just works" claims with suspicion.
It'll be interesting to see what happens with the hoards of Mozilla/OpenJDK/OpenSolaris start using Mercurial. While there's a lot of GNOME devs using GIT, I'm unconvinced about the numbers as well. Asking at a GNOME conference probably isn't the best representative audience.
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