[teampractices] Bugzilla migration Re: Project management tools review: Regressions/tradeoffs; migration

[Matthew Flaschen]

On 03/26/2014 04:38 PM, Steven Walling wrote:
> I'd also like to suggest a somewhat radical alternative, which is not
> automatically importing any Bugzilla items in to Phabricator. Let me
> explain the steps here and what I think the advantages would be:
>
>  1. We set up Phabricator. All new issues should appear there, and we
>     direct users to do so. (Assuming we still want users directly
>     reporting in to Phabricator).
>  2. Bugzilla is set to read-only mode except for admins.
>  3. We hold a big party in SF and with remote participation over Hangout
>     on Air + IRC, where all teams participate and as a group we import
>     tickets from Bugzilla they actually think are relevant. I think we
>     should/could encourage this to be more intensive, like true
>     all-night weekend hackathons with food, beer, and cool swag
>     (t-shirt: "I survived the Bugzilla migration of 2014.")
>  4. Read-only mode of Bugzilla is made available indefinitely as a
>     history record.

In my opinion, this definitely isn't workable without an individual 
migration tool (migrate Bugzilla bug [user input] to Phabricator).

Otherwise, users are going to have to copy bugs (that didn't get 
selected in the food/beer session) manually, and either copy the whole 
history or link back (both frustrating in different ways).

Even with the migration tool, it's debatable.  I kind of prefer:

1. Just migrate everything (can still triage in Phabricator, bug 123 is 
a simple regex that always goes the same place, history is in one place).

The migration would be challenging (more so depending how high the 
fidelity is), but it's doable.

or:

2. All new bugs go to Phabricator (Bugzilla is locked for new bugs). 
The IDs don't overlap, and there could be a special URL (e.g. 
bugs.wikimedia.org/123) that redirected you to the right one. 
Everything else stays the same.  Pretty quickly, this will shift a lot 
(and increasing) attention to Phabricator, while letting existing bugs 
finish their life.  The downside is the history isn't in one place.

Matt Flaschen