After the discussion in the forums regarding the migration, we agreed that Robert would get in touch with GitHub to find out if they could help us post the new GitHub issues under the handles we've mapped to the original contributors on Bugzilla. He learned there's no way to do that directly.
They suggested it might be possible by using an export tool that GitLab Enterprise has (yes, GitLab, not GitHub) to get the issues from Bugzilla to GitLab, then using GitHub for Business to import those issues to GitHub from GitLab. On the surface, that doesn't really look feasible. At a minimum, it seems that would require every one who submitted a Bugzilla issue to also have a GitLab account.
However, he did learn that GitHub has a hidden API we can use that will be an improvement on what we have now. Importantly, it will allow us to bypass rate limits, making the whole process go a lot more quickly. That in turn will allow us to post each comment on a Bugzilla issue as a separate comment on the GitHub issue.
Our current plan is to go for the latter option. Specifically regarding the issues:
- everything will be posted to GitHub under a dummy account
- the Bugzilla handle of the author of each issue will be in the GitHub issue's title
- a link to the Bugzilla issue will be added in the initial comment
- the author of each issue and everyone on the CC list will have their GitHub handles
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tagged in the initial comment - each comment on the Bugzilla issue will be posted separately on the GitHub issue (I need to verify with Robert that he'll tag the GitHub handle of any comment author who isn't already in the CC list)
- text from Bugzilla will be posted to GitHub in Markdown code blocks to avoid formatting issues
- GitHub labels will be created from Bugzilla keywords and applied to the new GitHub issues as appropriate
- the original Bugzilla issue will be updated with a link to the new GitHub issue and a note that further comments on the Bugzilla issue may not be seen
I think that addresses most of the concerns raised about the format of the issues in the previous discussion. Are we missing anything?
At some point after the migration, we'll put the Bugzilla instance into read-only mode. We've never intended to shut it down. We need to migrate it to a server under our control eventually. Once it's set to read-only, we'll want dlang-bot to still be able to have write access so that it can close issues on Bugzilla when the associated issues on GitHub are closed.
Vladimir has already done some preliminary work on dlang-bot. I still need to get with him to discuss the process to ensure we handle it the right way and are prepared for all of the post-migration steps we need to take.