[Python-Dev] PEP 481 - Migrate Some Supporting Repositories to Git and Github (original) (raw)

Donald Stufft donald at stufft.io
Sun Nov 30 18:14:20 CET 2014

On Nov 30, 2014, at 12:09 PM, Donald Stufft <donald at stufft.io> wrote:

On Nov 30, 2014, at 11:55 AM, Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote: On Nov 30, 2014, at 09:54 AM, Ian Cordasco wrote: - Migrating "data" from GitHub is easy. There are free-as-in-freedom tools to do it and the only cost is the time it would take to monitor the process Extracting data may be easy, but migrating it is a different story. As the Mailman project has seen in trying to migrate from Confluence to Moin, there is a ton of very difficult work involved after extracting the data. Parsing the data, ensuring that you have all the bits you need, fitting it into the new system's schema, working out the edge cases, adapting to semantic differences and gaps, ensuring that all the old links are redirected, and so on, were all exceedingly difficult[*]. Even converting between two FLOSS tools is an amazing amount of work. Look at what Eric Raymond did with reposurgeon to convert from Bazaar to git. I fail to see how this is a reasonable argument to make at all since, as you mentioned, converting between two FLOSS tools can be an amazing amount of work. Realistically the amount of work is going to be predicated on whether or not there is a tool that already handles the conversion for you. Assuming of course that the data is available to you at all. As a particularly relevant example, switching from Mercurial to Git is as easy as installing hg-git, creating a bookmark for master that tracks default, and then pushing to a git repository.

When looking for a tool that did this (specifically Github -> Gitlab because the two are most similar) I found https://gitlab.com/sigmavirus24/issues-migration/blob/master/migrate.py which happens to be written by Ian. I would guess that he is likely speaking from experience about migrating off of Github to go to Gitlab.

Donald Stufft PGP: 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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