[Python-Dev] PEP 481 - Migrate Some Supporting Repositories to Git and Github

[Donald Stufft]

> 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.

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