Migrate from Bugzilla to GitHub issues

[mikej888]

dill:
We liked your suggestion of unified bug tracking and are thinking about our suggestion of moving to github for all issue tracking -- can you see any downside of switching over to github issues? I see there are several importers to move all our bugs across, do you have any recommendations on which would be easily done?

[mikej888]

As your bug tracking is a mix of Word docs, Bugzilla and (for dsm) GitHub tickets, moving across to GitHub for all issue tracking can only be an upside. I worked on a project, OGSA-DAI, for many years which started by used Bugzilla,whose interface quickly proved a problem to both our users and ourselves. We moved to a TRAC wiki/issue tracker. This shared similar default issue categories to GitHub:

• TRAC: duplicate, invalid, noaction. worksforme, fixed, complete
• GitHub: bug, enhancement, help wanted, duplicate, invalid, wontfix, question

We found this easy to use not just for bugs and features but all project activities e.g. writing papers or docs, web site issues, test issues etc. We've used TRAC issues for internal project management on SSI since we started in 2010. As another example, the MICE particle physics project, who I worked with for a bit, use issues for their software activities too:

http://micewww.pp.rl.ac.uk/projects/maus/issues

The only downside is you end up with a large number of open tickets which need regular policing and being honest about what really won't be fixed. But this downside is present in Bugzilla and your Word doc approach anyway.

For porting the Bugzilla entries across you have 110 open (out of 120 total) but only 17 have been updated since 01/01/2013 and 12 since 01/01/2014. So there are three options:

• Automatically export all (open and closed) Bugzilla issues and import into GitHub.
• Review all Bugzilla entries, close any you won't fix, close any that are no longer applicable, and import the rest automatically or manually.
• Leave them as-is and port specific ones across manually when you fix, or close them.

Migrating the Bugzilla entries is less pressing than migrating those in the KnownProblems and ResolvedProblems Word docs.

[dill]

Regarding importing bugzilla issues en masse, I fixed the migration script at rowanj/BugzillaMigrate, over the weekend. A version that doesn't crash can be found at dill/BugzillaMigrate.

[mikej888]

Cloned into https://github.com/mikej888/BugzillaMigrate, wrote some user doc (for example the prerequisite modules were not, by default, on my OS, and I had to see how to create a GitHub API token). Fixed problem with attachment handling and changed so it has a link back to the original Bugzilla attachment. Examples:

• Imported issues: https://github.com/mikej888/distance-issues/issues
• bug 105 => issue
• bug 86 => issue which has a jpg attachment.
• bug 103 => issue which has a zip attachment.

Issued pull request to you: DistanceDevelopment/BugzillaMigrate#1

[mikej888]

Should clarify licence of Perl script with "rowanj" as just because it's on GitHub doesn't imply it's open source (but as they've merged a pull request from another GitHub member it implies they've no problem with modifications). So we could just push our changes back to him.

[dill]

Asked for license clarification at rowanj/BugzillaMigrate#4