Moving Bugzilla to git?

[David Lawrence]

+1 and not just because Mcote is my boss :)

dkl

On 10/21/2013 12:19 PM, Mark Côté wrote:
> Hi all, I'm the manager of Mozilla's Bugzilla team. We've talked about
> this idea before, but I thought I would flesh it out and ask for feedback.
> 
> I think we should move the Bugzilla code off of the Bazaar system hosted
> by Mozilla and onto git, and maybe even GitHub. There are a few reasons
> for this:
> 
> * git is pretty much the de facto standard for VCSs these days. This
> means many people are familiar with it and like its flexibility (I
> certainly do).
> 
> * On the other side, Bazaar is almost dead. There are maybe 2-3 commits
> to trunk every month.
> 
> * GitHub is extremely popular, and for good reason, since it's a very
> powerful system. Exposure via GitHub could mean increased contributions
> (whether we can keep up with them or not is, of course, another question. 
> 
> * Mozilla would very much like to retire Tinderbox, since Bugzilla is
> the only system still using it. Moving to GitHub means we could use
> travis-ci, which is really nice (we use it for other projects on my team).
> 
> * Mozilla would also very much like to retire the Bazaar and CVS servers,
> both of which are used solely by Bugzilla.
> 
> Doing a one-time migration is quite easy using fast-import/fast-export.
> I've verified that it works, with one small error that should be simple
> to fix (a single file not deleted in the git version).
> 
> However, even with some advance warning, I don't think we can convert
> and then abandon Bazaar immediately due to Bugzilla's suggested upgrade
> path, which is to install a package and then pull updates directly from
> the Bazaar repository. If we had to do a security release, it doesn't
> seem right to require users to switch VCSs to get that fix. That said, I
> don't think we need to maintain Bazaar indefinitely, just for some grace
> period. I suggest 9 months, which would put that sometime mid-2014. I
> would, however, like to shut down CVS when we migrate to git,
> so that we don't have to maintain three VCSs at the same time.
> 
> I haven't found a suitable solution to automatically mirror changes from
> git to Bazaar; there is one project[1] that at first glance appeared
> suitable, but after running into problems, I had a discussion with the
> package's author, who stated that there difficult bugs that would
> prevent it from working the way we would need it to.
> 
> Luckily Bugzilla has already gone through this before, from CVS to
> Bazaar, and we have a script[2] that steps through Bazaar commits and
> applies them to a CVS repo. I've been modifying that script to do a
> similar git-to-bzr translation, and I'm confident I can get it working.
> The mirroring would be in a single direction, that is, from git to
> Bazaar; after the migration, Bazaar would be read only to everyone
> except the mirroring script.
> 
> We would still need migration instructions, which I believe we can do
> using the old cvs-to-bzr instructions[3] as a base.
> 
> As for location of the repository, we could have Mozilla host the
> official git repository and set up two-way mirroring to GitHub.
> 
> How does this sound to everyone? Any strong objections? I and the rest
> of the BMO team are willing to do most of the work.
> 
> Mark
> 
> 
> [1] https://launchpad.net/bzr-git
> [2] http://bzr.mozilla.org/bzr-plugins/bzr-to-cvs/view/head:/bzr-to-cvs.pl
> [3] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Bugzilla:Moving_From_CVS_To_Bazaar
> 

-- 
David Lawrence
dkl at mozilla.com