Bazaar Popularity
Why does popularity matter?
Popularity is an important factor in selecting a version control tool. Many projects use Subversion because many developers know it already, reducing a learning barrier to casual contributors. Other projects select Git because it's well known in the Linux developer community, particularly for kernel-related projects.
We believe projects should select the tool that gives their community the best chance to grow. That's often Bazaar: it's dead easy to learn, truly cross platform and suitable for normal people, not just elite hackers. Bazaar is also a lot more popular than many people realize. Our biggest user communities are:
We also have a growing community on Mac OS X.
How does Bazaar compare?
On Ubuntu, here are the numbers from http://popcon.ubuntu.com/by_inst as of October 9, 2009:
Tool |
Count |
subversion |
245k |
cvs |
164k |
git |
77k |
bzr |
39k |
mercurial |
28k |
darcs |
5.0k |
monotone |
2.5k |
It is difficult to known how many developers on Windows each tool has. Both Subversion and CVS are heavily used on Windows. The distributed VCS tools are beginning to gain momentum there as well, though Git remains far more popular on Linux and OS X than Windows.
The bottom line: Bazaar has a healthy user base currently. With our 2.0 release delivering better efficiency than previous releases, we expect that user base to actively grow in the future.