Tracker migration

[yorik]

Hi all,

As most of you know already I suppose, @chennes and me are going to duplicate all the currently open issues on our mantis tracker to GitHub issues. This move has been asked by a large number of people. This will happen on Monday 07 feb, and to not provoke any cross-posting we'll put the tracker into read-only mode.

If all goes well and no issue is detected, we'll leave the tracker into read-only mode and later on add to each mantis issue the URL to the corresponding issue on GitHub. Note that everything can be reverted easily if anything is not right, as the mantis issues won't be touched.

Some have emitted concerns about moving from a self-hosted solution to a proprietary platform, but there are many arguments for it, I'll repeat it here for convenience:

The current mantis tracker not used enough at all, mainly because it's a bit clunky to use and doesn't integrate with the git code (although there are plugins but it all fails regularly and nobody has been able to make it work). It's annoying to maintain and has no reliable backup system. GitHub is a proprietary platform, but we won't really be doing much more than hosting our issues there, the same way as we do with the git repos and pull requests, mostly for convenience because it's the most widely used git platform out there. Having our issues there too will also be convenient because it all connects seamlessly with pull requests and commits. Hopefully this will give a big boost in how issues are tracked, triaged and solved. GitHub also provides a decent API access to issues, so, same as the Git code itself, we only host our stuff there but we still have our data in hand and can moved elsewhere (gitlab? self-hosted gitea?) easily when needed. We have also set up a system to periodically back up the GitHub issues so we'll always have an updated copy at hand in case we need to migrate away.

In many senses, paradoxically, our issues will be much more portable on GitHub that they currently are...

So, don't post issues on monday, and please report any problem here!

[obelisk79]

Good luck! I hope everything goes smoothly and as expected, sounds like a big task.

[openBrain]

Wish you a seamless migration.

[Kunda1]

Been closing issues as much as possible before hand. Looking forward to this!

[chennes]

Developers should note that you will get a GitHub notification about any issue that you are assigned. This is only true of assignments, not of issues you posted, or participated in the discussion on. But for those of you with a lot of assigned issues, prepare to do a little inbox cleanup after Monday! We've decided not to make the @mentions from Mantis transition over "live", because if we did then anyone who participated in an issue discussion on Mantis would get pinged when the import occurs, which is massively annoying.

[chennes]

Anyone who is interested in seeing a preview, I've imported all the issues currently assigned to me into a test database:
https://github.com/chennes/MantisToGitHub/issues

I want to reiterate -- anyone with assigned issues is going to get pinged by this import, once for every assigned issue. It's pretty annoying, but the alternative was to lose the assignment information. I expect the process to take about an hour and a half starting at 0900 US Central time.

[Kunda1]

Only open tickets are getting migrated, right?

[chennes]

Haha, yes, thankfully! Open tickets only.

[Kunda1]

Anyone who is interested in seeing a preview, I've imported all the issues currently assigned to me into a test database:
https://github.com/chennes/MantisToGitHub/issues

Looks great!

[yorik]

The mantis tracker at https://tracker.freecadweb.org is now in read-only mode, and it has been fully backed up. The tracker will stay on as long as we need to (forever maybe?), to not loose references to it that circulate on the web... Later on we'll need to update the website too.

I na couple of hours, @chennes will launch the migration process. Please wait for an announcement here that everything is OK before posting issues on GitHub, thanks!