Bridge support in git for mercurial and bazaar

I’ve been involved in the git project for some time now, and through the years I’ve had to work with other DSCMs, like mercurial and monotone. Not really as a user, but investigating the inner workings of them, mostly for conversion purposes, and I’ve written tools that nobody used, like mtn2git, or pidgin-git-import, but eventually I decided; why not write something that everybody can use?

So, I present to you git-remote-hg, and git-remote-bzr. What do they do?

git clone "hg::http://selenic.com/repo/hello"
git clone "bzr::lp:gnuhello"

That’s right, you can clone both mercurial and bazaar repositories now with little to no effort.

The original repository will be tracked like any git repository:

% git remote show origin
* remote origin
  Fetch URL: hg::http://selenic.com/repo/hello
  Push  URL: hg::http://selenic.com/repo/hello
  HEAD branch: master
  Remote branches:hg and mercurial. 
    branches/default tracked
    master           tracked
  Local branch configured for 'git pull':
    master merges with remote master
  Local ref configured for 'git push':
    master pushes to master (create)

You can pull, and in fact push as well. Actually, you wouldn’t even notice that this remote is not a git repository. You can create and push new branches… everything.

You might be thinking that this code being so new might have many issues, and you might screw up a mercurial repository. While that is true to some extent, there’s already a project that tries to act as a bridge between mercurial and git: hg-git. This project has a long history, and a lot of people use it successfully. So, I took their test framework, cleaned it up, and used to test my git-remote-hg code. Eventually all the tests passed, and I cloned big mercurial repositories without any issue, and the result were exact replicas, and I know that because the SHA-1′s were the same

So you can even keep working on top of clones you have created with hg-git, and switch back and forth between git-remote-hg and hg-git as you wish. The advantage over hg-git, is that you don’t need to use the mercurial interface at all, you can use git

To enable the hg-git compatibility mode you would need this:

% git config --global remote-hg.hg-git-compat true

What about the others?

Surely I must not be the first one try something this cool, right? I don’t want to dwell into all the details why none of the other tools suited my needs, but let’s give a quick look:

hg-git

It’s for mercurial, not git. So you need to use it through the mercurial UI.

fast-export

This is a very nice tool, but only allows you to export stuff (fetch an hg repo), and you have to manually run the ‘git fast-import’ command, setup the marks, and so on. Also, it’s not very well maintained.

Another git-remote-hg

It needs hg-git.

Yet another git-remote-hg

You need quite a lot of patches on top of git, so your vanilla version of git is not going to cut it. In addition to that it doesn’t support as many features; no tags, no bookmarks. Plus it fails all my extensive tests for git-remote-hg.

git-hg

It needs separate tools, such as ‘hg convert’, and fast-export, and it doesn’t use remote helper infrastructure, so it’s not transparent: you have to run git-hg clone, git-hg fetch, and so on.

Another git-hg

It needs hg-git, and doesn’t use git’s remote helper infrastructure either: you have to do git hg-clone, git hg-pull, etc.

There might be others, but you get the point.

The situation in bazaar is not much better, but I’m not going to bother listing the tools.

More coolness

In fact, you can push and pull from and to mercurial and bazaar

% git remote -v
bzr	bzr::lp:~felipec/+junk/test (fetch)
bzr	bzr::lp:~felipec/+junk/test (push)
gh	gh:felipec/test.git (fetch)
gh	gh:felipec/test.git (push)
hg	hg::bb+ssh://felipec/test (fetch)
hg	hg::bb+ssh://felipec/test (push)

Isn’t that cool?

So, are there any drawbacks? Surely some information must be lost.

Nope, not really. At least not when using the hg-git compat mode, because all the extra information is saved in the commit messages.

Update: I forgot to mention the only bidirectionality problem: octopus merges. In git a merge can have any number of parent commits, but in mercurial only two are allowed. So you might have problem converting from a git repository to a mercurial one. It’s the only feature that hg-git has, that git-remote-hg doesn’t. As for bazaar, it also allows multiple parents, so it should work fine, but this hasn’t been thoroughly tested.

The only consideration is that in the case of mercurial branches are quite different from git branches, so you need to be really careful to get the behavior you want, which is why it’s best to just ignore mercurial branches, and use bookmarks instead. When you create git branches and push them to mercurial, bookmarks will be created on whatever branch is current.

Trying it out

Just copy them files (git-remote-hg, git-remote-bzr) to any location available in your $PATH (.e.g ~/bin), and start cloning

Soon they might be merged into upstream git, so they would be distributed as other contrib scripts (e.g. /usr/share/git), and eventually possibly enabled by default.

Enjoy!

Progress through the years, and Ruby awesomeness

We’ve all have noticed that when looking back at code you wrote years ago, you realize how much you have progressed–or how much you sucked in the past, depending on your perspective–so it’s always a fair assumption to say, that in the future you will look back at the code you are working now, and feel ashamed. Perhaps this becomes logarithmically less of an issue as time goes on, but at least I still experience this.

I want to share what I think is a good example of this. Ruby code is particularly special in this respect since there’s always tons of ways to write code that do exactly the same.

Back in 2007 when I started msn-pecan, I wanted a script to create a ChangeLog, not because I thought it was needed, but mainly to shut up the people that said the git log wasn’t good enough, and that you still needed to update the ChangeLog in every commit. Few of those people remain today, but my script is still here.

The objective was to output something like this:

== Release 0.0.2 ==

2007-11-30	Felipe Contreras 
	* Add readme.
	* Update copyright stuff.
	* Fix to allow aliases with special characters.

== Release 0.0.1 ==

2007-11-29	Felipe Contreras 
	* Fix warnings.
	* Add display name support.

2007-11-28	Felipe Contreras 
	* Add .gitignore file.
	* Update info.
	* Fix compilation.
	* Stuff required to compile.
	* Initial import.

For some reason I was forced to look at it:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require "stringio"

revs=`git rev-list master`
refs=`git for-each-ref --format="%(objectname) %(refname)" refs/tags`

commits = revs.map { |e| e.chomp }

tags = {}

list = {}
list_order = []
$tag = ""

refs.each do |l|
  tag, name = l.chomp.split(" ")
  name = name.slice(/refs\/tags\/v(.*)/, 1)
  tags[tag] = name
end

commits.each do |e|
  commit = StringIO.new(`git show --pretty="format:%an ::%ai::%s\n%b" --quiet #{e}`)
  author, date, subject = commit.readline.chomp.split("::")
  date = date.split(" ")[0]
  if tags[e]
    $tag = tags[e]
    list_order << {:id => $tag}
  end
  id = "#{date}\t#{author}"
  uid = "#{date}\t#{author}\t#{$tag}"
  if not list[uid]
    list[uid] = []
    list_order << {:id => id, :value => list[uid]}
  end
  list[uid] << subject
end

list_order.each do |i|
  id = i[:id]
  value = i[:value]

  if value
    puts "#{id}"
    puts value.map { |e| "\t* #{e}" }.join("\n")
    puts "\n"
  else
    puts "== Release #{id} ==\n\n"
  end
end

If you are familiar with Ruby, you would see that there’s tons of things that don’t make sense there, unnecessary complexity, simpler idioms, etc. So I decided to clean it up:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'date'

tags = {}
tag = nil
commits = []

class Commit
  attr_reader :author, :date, :tag

  def initialize(id, subject, author, date, tag)
    @id = id
    @author = author
    @date = Date.parse(date)
    @subject = subject
    @tag = tag[1..-1] if tag
  end

  def to_s
    return @subject
  end

end

open("|git for-each-ref --format='%(objectname) %(refname:short)' refs/tags").each do |l|
  commit, id = l.chomp.split(" ")
  tags[commit] = id
end

open("|git log --oneline --format='%H%x00%an %x00%ai%x00%s'").each do |l|
  commit, author, date, subject = l.chomp.split("")
  tag = tags[commit] if tags[commit]
  commits << Commit.new(commit, subject, author, date, tag)
end

commits.group_by(&:tag).each do |tag, commits|
    puts "== Release #{tag} ==\n\n"
    commits.group_by(&:date).sort.reverse.each do |date, commits|
      commits.group_by(&:author).each do |author, commits|
        puts "#{date}\t#{author}\n"
        puts commits.map { |e| "\t* #{e}" }.join("\n")
        puts "\n"
      end
    end
end

So we went from code that took more than 10s to complete, to one that barely took 100ms, it’s much easier to read, smaller, and it’s actually more correct (there was a bug in sorted dates). Not bad!

I was particularly surprised by the method group_by, which takes any Enumeratable and does what the name says:

[
  {:id => 0, :name => 'foo'},
  {:id => 0, :name => 'bar'},
  {:id => 1, :name => 'roo'} ].group_by { |e| e[:id] }
=> {
  0=>[{:id=>0, :name=>"foo"}, {:id=>0, :name=>"bar"}],
  1=>[{:id=>1, :name=>"roo"}] }

And then, in the functional tradition, you can sort, reverse, etc. the result.

Moreover, instead of getting the full output of a command with `git command`, it’s much better to pipe it with open("|git command"), something obvious, but a bit tedious to do in other languages.

The rest is git magick–I’ve been progressing on that front as well

Did I mention I love ruby?

msn-pecan 0.1.4 released

Hi,

Long time no see! I’ve been busy with many other things and haven’t had time to work on msn-pecan, but I’m back.

This a minor bugfix release, mostly to fix issues while reconnecting. These will be useful for HTTP non-persistent connections which is a work in progress. There’s plenty many other patches pending in the queue, some you can try on the master branch.

Felipe Contreras (6):
      node: avoid writes when connection is closed
      ssl-conn: cleanup properly on errors
      io: properly cancel connect operations
      build: fix platform detection
      win32: update instructions for Arch Linux
      win32: version bump

Download from the (usual place).

Without dissent, there’s no progress

We all know free speech is “good”, but many people don’t know why, or even, have a misconception of what free speech actually means. Others argue that free speech is good in a society, but not on certain communities, like online forums, or technical mailing lists, and are quick to ban the dissidents. I have been called a troll simply for speaking my mind, which happened to be against the established view, but is that really the case? Should everyone that disagrees vigorously be called a troll and be banned? Should dissidence be prohibited? Are there communities where free will is not desirable? Let’s explore.

Dissent is merely defined as a difference in opinion, but more broadly; to actively challenge an established doctrine, policy, or institution[1]. In some cases it’s clear that there’s nothing wrong with dissent, it might be even desirable–as in the case of Mahatma Gandhi opposing the British Empire. In other cases it’s not so clear, or so it would appear judging from the reactions of many people.

If you were a king (before the french revolution) you probably were against peasant dissidence, but if you were a peasant, you would probably be OK with it–in fact, you would think it’s essential for the well-being of the republic and constitute free speech as an inalienable right, as in fact many revolutionaries did, after getting rid of monarchies, dictatorships, etc.

Watch Stephen Colbert roasting George W. Bush in front of his face, and that’s fine–that’s how a modern society is supposed to work.

Is this offensive? Is this demeaning? Of course, but there’s nothing wrong with that; criticism is part of a modern society, even if it’s towards the most important man in that society (in theory), and it should be protected specially in those cases. In the past it would be inconceivable to do this against the king, even in modern societies, as for example against Vladimir Putin. It certainly would be convenient to the Bush administration to just shut up the press, but that shouldn’t happen in a modern society.

And that is something that is often forgotten: free speech laws are specifically designed to protect the weak; the majority of the population doesn’t need a government to grant them free speech. It’s not the majority that loves the king that needs protection to speak against him; it’s the minority that needs it. It’s not the majority that thought slavery was OK in the past, it was the minority that was against the establishment. It is unpopular ideas that need protection.

Free speech has limits, of course; your right to free speech ends when you violate the right of somebody else, like committing defamation. The problem is that a lot of people don’t understand what free speech actually means, and what the law actually says (as in the case of defamation). For example, in modern societies I wouldn’t have any problem saying that Obama is stupid, that Jesus is gay, or that Muhammad the prophet can kiss my ass. Some of this might be false, offensive, and maybe even stupid, but there’s no law that protects people from offense, lies, or stupidity. And there’s a reason for that; it’s not easy to define what is wrong or stupid, and what should be offensive. A king might say that criticizing the king is offensive–very conveniently for himself–and therefore nobody would be safe to throw criticism, and unless the king was indeed flawless–that’s a problem.

Even the UN Secretary-General seems to not understand this, as he tried to push to make blasphemy a crime, probably in response to the increasing violence from Muslims all around the world angry about videos and cartoons that are protected by this very basic freedom in modern societies.

Barack Obama does a pretty good job in explaining why free speech is important.

With foresight it’s easy to see that Martin Luther King Jr. was doing something good in fighting against the establishment, but that was not always the case, many people are considered activists, inciters, and even terrorists, just for speaking truth to power. Nelson Mandela was considered a terrorist by the USA until 2008[2]. History determines, time and again, that people that fought to silence the dissidents were plain wrong.

Julian Assange is an example of a modern dissident that is still in mid-fight, and there’s still people that claim he should be killed, even though there are laws that protect the media from not divulging their sources precisely for that reason; in order for the media to criticize the government efficiently, government secrets should be exposed, especially those who are damming to the government.

Well, this is all well and good, for the freedom fighters such as Gandhi, Assange, Mandela, and you probably share a lot of ideas with them, but what about that annoying guy that criticizes everything, or maybe the conspiracy nut? They also need protection, they also need free speech.

Christopher Hitchens goes to great extents to explain not only why free speech–all free speech–is important, but also what exactly is free speech, something many people get wrong.

Hopefully at this point it should be clear that free speech is good, and dissent shouldn’t be squashed, but yet, one of the first things online communities do when encountering unpopular (or unpleasant) opinions, is ban the messenger. Have we not learned anything?

I have explained before why I think Linux is the most important software project in history, but I forgot one aspect: freedom of expression. Anybody can say anything they want in the mailing list, and they won’t be banned. If you are truly a pest and have nothing to contribute, the worst that will happen is that you will be ignored. Most open software projects don’t do that (to their detriment), and that’s one of the reason why many feel compelled and eventually fork, which would be homologous to a revolution; the old dictator didn’t listen, so we took over–unfortunately, they end up doing the same mistake, and eventually ban people that disagree with them.

So, the next time you feel somebody is annoying, or stupid, or just plainly obviously wrong to the point that you want them to shut up forever with a ban… don’t. Everybody deserves the right to say what they want, but more importantly; everybody should have the right to listen to them. You (and everybody else) have the right to ignore them.

Without dissent, there’s no progress.

Top 10 suggestions from the 2011 GNOME user survey

I’ve taken the time to read one by one the suggestions from the 2011 GNOME user survey, I’ve only managed to read 20% of them so far, but I don’t think they will shift that much (I might update this post if they do).

The next version of the survey will have these and other suggestions already listed, so it would be easier for users’ voice to be heard, and summarize the results.

Note: I already posted most of these on my previous post, but apparently people didn’t like my critical tone, so these are the suggestions only, not my opinion.

1. Better customization

Not only do people want more options, but they think some of the current ones are useless, and that defaults are all wrong. They also want more options for power management, like deciding what happens when you close the lid. Also more options to change the appearance: font, icons, keyboard bindings, screensaver, etc. Also, disable the accessibility stuff.

2. GNOME 2

People love their GNOME 2. A lot of them suggested to have two interfaces: the traditional one, and the shell, others requested to improve the fallback mode, but most of them demanded to get rid of GNOME shell completely. A lot of people also asked specifically to bring back the GNOME 2 panel, and taskbar.

3. Improve performance and footprint

A lot people think GNOME is too bloated and asked for better performance, less CPU usage, less memory usage, smoother animations, faster start-up times, etc. Specially the ones that have used GNOME shell, which apparently is a resource hog, or at least that’s what users say.

4. Nautilus

People are definitely not happy with nautilus. They complain it’s too slow, takes too much time to start, and lacks a lot functionality. Many suggested to get rid of it and use some of the already existing alternatives.

5. Notifications

The new notifications are annoying; one shouldn’t need to move the mouse cursor the corner to see them; that makes it easy to miss them, which defeats the purpose of a notification.

6. Shutdown / Restart / Suspend

This is a no-brainer; just add this option. Yes, you can see them by pressing “alt” but people don’t want that, there’s no excuse to remove basic functionality, and users are complaining hard for this particular feature.

7. Improve theming

Users want better themes and icons, they don’t like the default theme, also want a dark theme, and think the amount of customization a theme can achieve is not enough.

8. Better multi-monitor support

Another very requested feature was to improve multi-monitor support, which apparently works very badly in GNOME shell.

9. Improve Evolution

A considerable amount of people suggested to get rid of Evolution completely, because it has so many problems, and because there are better alternatives (i.e. Thunderbird). Some people only want to use the calendar part of it, because it’s integrated to other parts of GNOME’s UI, so they suggested to split this component. The rest suggested many ways to improve it, like stop the constant crashing.

10. Listen to users

Lastly, a lot of people think that GNOME developers are ignoring users, and their suggestions. Also, they don’t like the developers’ attitude that users are idiots, and developers/designers know best.

The problem

As #10 shows, the problem is that GNOME developers don’t listen to the users, or at least that’s the perception from a lot of users, and since the community rejected the idea of running and/or blessing this survey, it would be safe to assume that they would ignore the results. The story of this survey is rather interesting, and explains a lot, but you can read about it through Bruce Byfield’s mouth instead of mine in his article ‘The Survey That GNOME Would Rather Ignore‘.

Even before the survey was run, GNOME developers said the results would be worthless, however, the only valid criticism was the possibility of non-response bias, which fortunately didn’t happen, and I explained why in my analysis of the survey results. I still haven’t received any comments from GNOME developers after I publicized the analysis of the results, so if there’s any valid criticism remaining, I still haven’t heard of it.

I wish they would look at these results critically, not outright reject them, and if there’s any problem with the survey, tackle the problems for the 2012 survey, and even more: run the survey themselves. Wouldn’t that be great?

Other suggestions

Reduce dependencies (specially PulseAudio)
Improved reliability / stability
Minimize / Mazimize
Tiling
alt+tab
Faster shell search
Collaborate more with other communities
Fix ATI fglrx issues
Integrate Zeitgeist
Render KDE apps seamlessly
Reduce dead space
Compiz compatibility

Analysis of the 2011 GNOME user survey results

Last year Phoronix launched the 2011 GNOME user survey, an effort I initiated to try to give a voice to GNOME users, a voice I though was sorely lacked. I knew the effort wasn’t going to be accepted by GNOME developers, because through the years they have always rejected anything that resembles user feedback: surveys, polls, brainstorm, or something as easy as enabling voting in bugzilla. I gave it a try anyway because I made a bet with Zeeshan Ali that this would happen, and it did (although he never accepted that).

However, in the process the effort received a lot of positive feedback and the survey improved quite a lot, it would have been a shame to throw it to the trash, so, as Alan Cox suggested, I tried to make this survey happen anyway and thanks to Michael Larabel from Phoronix, it did.

According to GNOME people, such a survey, or in fact, any survey will always give bad results, because it’s impossible to get rid of all the biases. This was discussed extensively in the GNOME desktop-devel mailing list, and despite all my efforts to convince them otherwise, I didn’t succeed (which wasn’t a surprise at all). To give an idea of the sort of resistance we are talking about, I made the argument that even president elections across the globe would have similar problems, and they argued that even those are flawed. One would have to wonder what method in their minds would give proper statistically significant user feedback, but the answer is not surprising: nothing. Yet, they claim they listen to users, somehow. Although their method of “listening to users” remains mysterious, it probably involves personal experience: talking with their friends and family, and close circles (which are more biased than any survey could).

But in this discussion there was valid criticism, mainly the non-response bias. It was argued that only people that hate GNOME would answer the survey, and thus the survey would be biased towards negative comments, and the results worthless. There is some truth to that claim, and the survey tried to identify and mitigate that factor, with success I think. I will start by explained how this was done, because otherwise the survey would indeed be worthless for many purposes, which is not the case. Other arguments against the results of the survey are invalid in my opinion, but unlike other blogs from GNOME developers, this blog has comments open, so if you disagree and find other valid criticism to this survey, you are free to comment below.

Nevertheless, the most important point that GNOME people missed, is that this was a survey v1.0, and like all open source software, it can (and will) improve. Even if they are correct (they aren’t), and the results of v1.0 is totally worthless, that doesn’t mean that v2.0, or later versions, will. Unfortunately in their mind neither v1.0, nor v100.0 can provide any helpful results at all, or for that matter any other survey in the history of humanity.

I will present the rationale of why I think these results are good and valid, and I think any rational person would agree, but you would be the judge of that.

If you want to see the straight results of the survey, go to this Phoronix page.

Non-response bias

Let’s invent a scenario where we have a population of 1000 people, and we want to figure out how many people like shopping. To do that we sample 100 people and it turns out around 25% of them say they like shopping. That’s it, right? Job done. Well, what happens if most of people interviewed where males, say 2/3 males, 1/3 females. We know from other sources that we should expect the male/female ratio to be around 50/50, so we know there was a disproportion, but is that a problem? If it turns out that say, females have a bias towards liking shopping, then yes, there is a problem.

If we find results like that, we know there is bias, but we can use our knowledge about the male/female ratio expected in the total population to calculate what would be the real amount of people that like to shop in the total population. But as GNOME people were quick to mention, we don’t have a census of Linux desktop users, so we don’t have any idea of the proportions we might expect for different biases. In the example above, if we don’t know the male/female ratio of the total population, then we have no idea if 33/66 was disproportionate or not, all we know is that there is bias. And that’s the end of the game, the 25% our survey returned is worthless. We can say how many females and males like shopping, but nothing about the total population. I wouldn’t call this totally worthless, but GNOME people would.

But that is only if there is a bias. If it turns out that males and females like shopping at roughly the same proportion, then it doesn’t matter what is the ratio of the total population, and it doesn’t matter if we are being disproportionate or not. All we can do is identify the bias, if we don’t even ask the question “What is your sex?”, then we are truly lost, because we can’t even know if there was bias or not. So all we can do is try to identify all possible sources of bias, and then check if this bias is indeed happening or not.

Even worst is what happens if no females participate in the survey at all. That is highly unlikely in this case, but consider online surveys; people without Internet would be unlikely to participate, and if they have a bias then the results would be skewed. This was also used by GNOME people as an argument against any kind of online survey.

However, I had an idea; what if we ask people to print the survey and give it to these kind of people without Internet. This in effect would be no different from a survey that is not online, the only difference is that instead of paying people to go around finding GNOME users, we ask the community to do so – crowd-sourcing the problem. We didn’t ask this directly, perhaps for v2, but I added a question to identify how people are filling the survey: on their own, on behalf of somebody else, and so on.

We did spend a considerable amount of time trying to identify all these possible biases, and then add questions in the survey to see if there’s bias or not, and that’s all anybody can do.

So all the criticism GNOME people threw was taken care one way or the other, even if they didn’t agree so. The only way the results of this survey would be worthless is if somebody comes up with a possible bias that no question in the survey would identify (we need a new survey), or if it turns out there’s a real bias (we need a census).

Was there bias?

Let’s examine the main claim of GNOME people; people that answer the survey would have a bias towards hating GNOME.

Overall, how satisfied are you with GNOME?

Barely, Completely, Halfway, Mostly, Not At All

How are you taking this survey?

I am acting on behalf of somebody else, Completely on my own, Other, Somebody is pushing for me to do it

As you can see irrespective of the way people answered the survey, there’s a clear tendency: most people avoided the extremes and answered primarily “Mostly”, and then “Halfway”. The people that answered “I am acting on behalf of somebody else” went more for the extremes, but the difference is not significantly different from the people that answered “Completely on my own”. So, fortunately it seems GNOME people were wrong; there’s no bias.

Just to be sure, lets look at another, similar question:

How do you compare your current GNOME version with the version from one year ago?

Better, No Changes, Cannot Say, Worse

Again we see no significant differences depending on how people answered the survey; most people said either better, or worse at about the same rate. The people that answered on behalf of somebody else had a tendency to answer “Better”, and the people that got pushed, answered “Worse” a bit more, but in general no big difference.

Clearly, if there is a bias, it’s not dependent on how people are answering the survey. There’s another possibility; we didn’t get enough proxy responses. Statistically speaking, we would expect the results of “I am acting on behalf of somebody else” to be ±18% off target, but “Somebody is pushing for me to do it” only ±8, based on the amount of responses with a 95% certainty. So it would be nice if we get more of these responses on the next survey, but we can be relatively certain that if there is a bias, it’s not that great. Certainly not enough to declare the whole survey worthless.

I did similar analyses on the different questions of the survey, and I couldn’t find any significant biases from groups that could be underrepresented, therefore, the results of the survey are valid.

However, there are certain interesting results.

Interesting results

This is the same improvement question, but depending on whether or not people used GNOME 3.

How do you compare your current GNOME version with the version from one year ago?

Better, No Changes, Cannot Say, WorsePeople that haven’t used GNOME 3 mostly say that it hasn’t changed, but the ones that have used it have very different opinions, which matches what we have seen in online discussions: people either hate it or love it, but it’s interesting to see that the split is 50/50.

Another theory that popped in the discussions was that people that use terminals would hate GNOME 3, but “normal people” would love it.

Overall, how satisfied are you with GNOME?

Barely, Completely, Halfway, Mostly, Not At All

How often do you use a terminal/console?

Is there anything else?, When I have no other option, I can’t live without them, What is that?

However, it seems to be the opposite: people that don’t even know what a terminal is certainly don’t like GNOME, it’s the rest that do: from people that use it when there’s no other option, from people that don’t use anything else.

One of my theories was that contributors to the project would have a bias toward liking it.

Overall, how satisfied are you with GNOME?

Barely, Completely, Halfway, Mostly, Not At All

Have you contributed to the GNOME project?

No, Yes

But it appears I was also wrong; contributors to the project have roughly the same opinion as the non-contributors.

There is a much more clear differentiator tough: people that have tried to contact the project, unsuccessfully.

Overall, how satisfied are you with GNOME?

Barely, Completely, Halfway, Mostly, Not At All

Have you ever contacted the GNOME team?

No, I don’t know how; No, never had the need; Yes, successfully; Yes, unsuccessfully

The people that have tried to contact the project unsuccessfully tend to say either they are barely satisfied, or not at all with GNOME. Of all the people that have contacted the project 2/3 of them say it was unsatisfactory. This should be worrying.

And then, people that like to use another window manager.

Overall, how satisfied are you with GNOME?

Barely, Completely, Halfway, Mostly, Not At All

Have you ever contacted the GNOME team?

Yes, successfully; Yes, unsuccessfully; No, I don’t know how; No, never had the need

Clearly GNOME has problems interacting with other window managers. Or at least people seem to think so.

What needs to change?

Unfortunately there was no easy way to ask GNOME users this question so it was more or less open form, and that’s very difficult to analyze, however, I’ve taken the time to read them one by one, and count them, and so far I have 20% of the 10000 responses, but I doubt reading the rest will change the results much. I will try to do so in the future, as time permits, but I don’t promise much.

Better customization (397)

This is by far the most requested, people don’t want to manually fiddle with gconf/dconf, extensions, or gnome-tweak, they want a whole lot more options integrated. One suggestion was to have an advanced mode, which is something I have suggested in the past, but GNOME developers are adamant against it for no rational reasons.

GNOME 2 (113)

People love their GNOME 2. A lot of them suggested to have two interfaces, others requested to improve the fallback mode, but most of them demanded to get rid of GNOME shell directly. A lot of people also asked to bring back the GNOME 2 panel, and taskbar.

Improve performance and footprint (89)

Nautilus (57)

Notifications (46)

The new notifications are annoying; one shouldn’t need to move the mouse cursor the corner to see them; that makes it easy to miss them, which defeats the purpose of a notification.

Shutdown / Restart / Suspend (44)

Improve theming (32)

Users want better themes and icons, they don’t like the default theme, also want a dark theme, and also think the amount of customization a theme can achieve is not enough.

Better multi-monitor support (32)

Another very requested feature was to improve multi-monitor support.

Others (in order)

Improve Evolution
Listen to users
Reduce dependencies (specially PulseAudio)
Improved reliability / stability
Minimize / Mazimize
Tiling
Get rid of Evolution (or split the calendar component
alt+tab
Faster shell search
Collaborate more with other communities
Fix ATI fglrx issues
Integrate Zeitgeist
Render KDE apps seamlessly
Reduce dead space
Compiz compatibility
Developer attitude

Conclusion

What is clear is that most people want more configuration options, a lot liked GNOME 2 much better than GNOME 3, and they want an option to have an interface similar to GNOME 2 with GNOME 3 technology. For every user that likes GNOME 3, there is one that hates it. There’s plenty of people that think they are ignored by GNOME developers, and that users are treated like idiots (and they don’t like that). Users want a better attitude from the developers, not only toward users, but towards other FOSS projects like KDE (GTK+ apps like fine under KDE, Qt apps don’t under GNOME), and less of the not-invented-here syndrome.

Hopefully it has become clear to rational people that there is some value in the results of this survey, even if GNOME developers reject it. All the known biases were identified, and fortunately the ones that could cause non-response bias didn’t do so, so the results are valid and nobody was underrepresented

The next survey will incorporate some of the findings here, and hopefully more people would be aware of the need to reach people that normally wouldn’t answer this survey. Perhaps at some point GNOME developers would accept that there is no significative non-response bias because of that and start listening to the results.

Half a million views, and stats

This blog finally reached the 500,000 views milestone, which might not be interesting to many people, but perhaps the stats will, so here they are

From the looks of it, most of the readers come from RSS feeds, not really other blogs or planets. The busiest day I wrote the blog post My disagreement with Elop on MeeGo which was even featured in Finish online newspapers, so clearly the was a huge bump, but not enough to be the #1 post. Also, a lot of people are interested in GNOME 3 suckage, unfortunately the only post I have about GNOME 3 is rather small (and even then it got criticism from GNOMErs), so I shouldn’t pull my punches and write a full-blown criticism (there’s plenty of material). I’m already working on an analysis of the GNOME user survey results, which is already very interesting on its own, but will take time.

So, here they are. Enjoy

General

views all-time: 501,133
views on your busiest day, June 22, 2011: 11,762

Top ten referrers

Search Engines – 65,202
maemo.org – 21,009
Reddit – 9,421
code.google.com – 4,875
Hacker News – 4,565
meego.com – 4,448
mobile-review.com – 3,433
Google Reader – 2,725
Twitter – 2,294
talk.maemo.org – 2,223

Top ten countries

United States – 20,059
United Kingdom – 4,127
Germany – 3,973
India – 3,128
Finland – 2,740
France – 2,347
Canada – 2,286
Italy – 2,219
Russian Federation – 1,899
Australia – 1,777

What about the others?

Another git-remote-hg

Yet another git-remote-hg

Another git-hg

More coolness

Trying it out

1. Better customization

2. GNOME 2

3. Improve performance and footprint

4. Nautilus

5. Notifications

6. Shutdown / Restart / Suspend

7. Improve theming

8. Better multi-monitor support

9. Improve Evolution

10. Listen to users

The problem

Other suggestions

Non-response bias

Was there bias?

Interesting results

What needs to change?

Better customization (397)

GNOME 2 (113)

Improve performance and footprint (89)

Nautilus (57)

Notifications (46)

Shutdown / Restart / Suspend (44)

Improve theming (32)

Better multi-monitor support (32)

Others (in order)

Conclusion

General

Top twenty posts / pages

Top ten searches

Top ten referrers

Top ten countries

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