A new thing I’ve been trying while writing this Git zine is doing a bunch of polls on Mastodon to learn about:
- which git commands/workflows people use (like “do you use merge or rebase more?” or “do you put your current git branch in your shell prompt?”)
- what kinds of problems people run into with git (like “have you lost work because of a git problem in the last year or two?”)
- which terminology people find confusing (like “how confident do you feel that you know what HEAD means in git?”)
- how people think about various git concepts (“how do you think about git branches?”)
- in what ways my usage of git is “normal” and in what ways it’s “weird”. Where am I pretty similar to the majority of people, and where am I different?
It’s been a lot of fun and some of the results have been surprising to me, so here are some of the results. I’m partly just posting these so that I can have them all in one place for myself to refer to, but maybe some of you will find them interesting too.
these polls are highly unscientific
Polls on social media that I thought about for approximately 45 seconds before posting are not the most rigorous way of doing user research, so I’m pretty cautious about drawing conclusions from them. Potential problems include: I phrased the poll badly, the set of possible responses aren’t chosen very carefully, some of the poll responses I just picked because I thought they were funny, and the set of people who follow me on Mastodon is not representative of all git users.
But here are a couple of examples of why I still find these poll results useful:
- The first poll is “what’s your approach to merge commits and rebase in git”? 600 people (30% of responders) replied “I usually use merge, rarely/never rebase”. It’s helpful for me to know that there are a lot of people out there who rarely/never use rebase, because I use rebase all the time – it’s a good reminder that my experiences isn’t necessarily representative.
- For the poll “how confident do you feel that you know what HEAD means in
git?“, 14% of people replied “literally no idea”. That tells me to be careful
about assuming that people know what
HEADmeans in my writing.
where to read more
If you want to read more about any given poll, you can click at the date at the bottom – there’s usually a bunch of interesting follow-up discussion.
Also this post has a lot of CSS so it might not work well in a feed reader.
Now! Here are the polls! I’m mostly just going to post the results without commenting on them.
merge and rebase
poll: what's your approach to merge commits and rebase in git?
merge conflicts
poll: if you use git, how often do you deal with nontrivial merge conflicts? (like where 2 people were really editing the same code at the same time and you need to take time to think about how to reconcile the edits)
another merge conflict poll:
have you ever seen a bug in production caused by an incorrect merge conflict resolution? I've heard about this as a reason to prefer merges over rebase (because it makes the merge conflict resolution easier to audit) and I'm curious about how common it is
I thought it was interesting in the next one that “edit the weird text file by hand” was most people’s preference:
poll: when you have a merge conflict, how do you prefer to handle it?
merge conflict follow up: if you prefer to edit the weird text file by hand instead of using a dedicated merge conflict tool, why is that?
poll: did you know that in a git merge conflict, the order of the code is different when you do a merge/rebase?
merge:
<<<<<<< HEAD
YOUR CODE
=======
OTHER BRANCH'S CODE
>>>>>>> c694cf8aabe
rebase:
<<<<<<< HEAD
OTHER BRANCH'S CODE
=======
YOUR CODE
>>>>>>> d945752 (your commit message)
(where "YOUR CODE" is the code from the branch you were on when you ran `git merge` or `git rebase`)
git pull
poll: do you prefer `git fetch` or `git pull`?
(no lectures about why you think `git pull` is bad please but if you use both I'd be curious to hear in what cases you use fetch!)
commits
[poll] how do you think of a git commit?
(sorry, you can't pick “it’s all 3”, I'm curious about which one feels most true to you)
branches
poll: how do you think about git branches? (I'll put an image in a reply with pictures for the 3 options)
as with all of these polls obviously all 3 are valid, I'm curious which one feels the most true to you
git environment
poll: do you put your current git branch in your shell prompt?
poll: do you use git on the command line or in a GUI?
(you can pick more than one option if it’s a mix of both, sorry magit users I didn't have space for you in this poll)
losing work
poll: have you lost work because of a git problem in the last year or two? (it counts even if it was "your fault" :))
meaning of various git terms
These polls gave me the impression that for a lot of git terms (fast-forward, reference, HEAD), there are a lot of git users who have “literally no idea” what they mean. That makes me want to be careful about using and defining those terms.
poll: how confident do you feel that you know what HEAD means in git?
another poll: how do you think of HEAD in git?
poll: when you see this message in `git status`:
”Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main’.”
do you know that your branch may not actually be up to date with the `main` branch on the remote?
poll: how confident do you feel that you know what the term "fast-forward" means in git, for example in this error message:
`! [rejected] main -> main (non-fast-forward)`
or this one:
fatal: Not possible to fast-forward, aborting.
(I promise this is not a trick question, I'm just writing a blog post about git terminology and I'm trying to gauge how people feel about various core git terms)
poll: how confident do you feel that you know what a "ref" or "reference" is in git? (“ref” and “reference” are the same thing)
for example in this error message (from `git push`)
error: failed to push some refs to 'github.com:jvns/int-exposed'
or this one: (from `git switch mybranch`)
fatal: invalid reference: mybranch
another git terminology poll: how confident do you feel that you know what a git commit is?
(not a trick question, I'm mostly curious how this one relates to people's reported confidence about more "advanced" terms like reference/fast-forward/HEAD)
poll: in git, do you think of "detached HEAD state" and "not having any branch checked out" as being the same thing?
poll: how confident do you feel that you know what the term "current branch" means in git?
(deleted & reposted to clarify that I'm asking about the meaning of the term)
other version control systems
I occasionally hear “SVN was better than git!” but this “svn vs git” poll makes me think that’s a minority opinion. I’m much more cautious about concluding anything from the hg-vs-git poll but it does seem like some people prefer git and some people prefer Mercurial.
poll 2: if you've used both svn and git, which do you prefer?
(no replies please, i have already read 300 comments about git vs other version control systems today and they were great but i can't read more)
gonna do a short thread of git vs other version control systems polls just to get an overall vibe
poll 1: if you've used both hg and git, which do you prefer?
(no replies please though, i have already read 300 comments about git vs other version control systems today and i can't read more)
that’s all!
It’s been very fun to run all of these polls and I’ve learned a lot about how people use and think about git.