.. title: Migrating tickets in Trac to bugs in Bugzilla
.. slug: trac2bugzilla
.. date: 2007-08-23 20:25:02
.. tags: dev, software

<p>
  I spent a large portion of the last few weeks at PCF building 
  a migration script to migrate tickets from our Trac instance to 
  bugs in our Bugzilla instance.
</p>
<p>
  I started writing SQL scripts, but then it got too hairy because
  there are a bunch of Trac ticket fields that have no constraints
  and translating them to Bugzilla equivalents required mappings and
  temp tables ...  I abandoned that approach pretty quickly and 
  wrote the migration script in Python.
</p>
<p>
  The outcome of the migration is pretty decent.  We've spent time
  fixing the data in Bugzilla after the migration, but I don't think
  there's a way to do a perfect migration because of the nature of
  the two bug systems.
</p>
<p>
  I thought the project was interesting and mentioned it to a few
  people.  The most common thing people respond with when hearing I 
  was working on migrating our bug data from Trac to Bugzilla is, "What???  
  WHY?!?!" and their eyes would open wide with shock.  I think Bugzilla 
  has an undeserved bad rap.
</p>
<p>
  The scripts are 
  <a href="https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/browser/trunk/resources/bugs">here</a> 
  (participatoryculture.org) if anyone else with similar plans is
  looking for them.
</p>
<p>
  As a side note, the <a href="http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0249/">Python 
  Database API specification PEP</a> is fantastic--anyone who contributed
  to it should get a gold star.
</p>