Transferring bugs from Launchpad to Gitlab (was: Re: Upstream bug comments on the mailing list and Launchpad)

[Thomas Huth]

On 19/04/2021 18.04, Peter Maydell wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Apr 2021 at 16:52, Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com> wrote:
> > On 15/04/2021 11.49, Kashyap Chamarthy wrote:
> > ...
> > > PS: I recall there was discussion on the list of moving to a different
> > >       GitLab tracker.  As Thomas Huth mentioned on IRC, more people seem
> > >       to have account on GitLab than on Launchpad.
> >
> > I think we basically agreed that we want to migrate to gitlab, but e.g.
> > Peter suggested that we copy the open bugs on launchpad to the gitlab
> > tracker first, so that we don't have two active trackers at the same time...
> > thus this needs someone with enough spare time to work on such a convertion
> > script first...
>
> In the meantime, can we disable bug reporting on gitlab? It's
> confusing to users to have two places, one of which is not
> checked by anybody. We already have two stray bugreports:
> https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues

I'd rather like to see us doing the move finally. I'm very much a Python 
ignorant, but since apparently nobody else has spare time to work on this at 
the moment, I've now done some copy-n-paste coding and came up with a script 
that can transfer bugs from Launchpad to Gitlab (see the attachment). You 
need a "private token" passed to the script via the GITLAB_PRIVATE_TOKEN 
environment variable so that it is able to access gitlab (such a token can 
be generated in your private setting pages on gitlab). Some transferred bugs 
can be seen here:

 https://gitlab.com/thuth/trackertest/-/issues

Notes:

- Not all information is transferred, e.g. no attachments yet.
  But considering that there is a link to the original launchpad
  bug, you can always look up the information there, so I think
  that should be fine.

- The script currently also adds the "tags" from the launchpad
  bug as "labels" in gitlab - do we want that, or do we rather
  want to restrict our labels in gitlab to a smaller set?

- Formatting of the bug description and comments is a little bit
  tricky, since the text is pre-formatted ASCII in launchpad and
  markdown on gitlab ... For now, I put the text from launchpad
  into "<pre>" HTML tags on gitlab, that should result in usable
  texts most of the time.

- Biggest problem so far: After transferring 50 bugs or so,
  gitlab refuses to take more bugs automatically with the
  message: 'Your issue has been recognized as spam. Please,
  change the content or solve the reCAPTCHA to proceed.'
  ... and solving captchas in a script is certainly way out
  of scope here. So if we want to copy over all bugs from
  launchpad, we might need to do that in junks.

- Do we want to auto-close the bugs in launchpad after we've
  transferred them? Or should they stay open until the bugs
  have been addressed? I tend to close them (with an appropriate
  comment added to the bug, too), but we could also mark the
  transferred bugs with a tag instead.

- Do we want to transfer also old "Wishlist" bug tickets from
  Launchpad? I think it's quite unlikely that we will ever
  address them... maybe we should close them on Launchpad with
  an appropriate comment?

 Thomas

launchpad2gitlab.py
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