Moving from Bugzilla to Launchpad

One of the things that was discussed at UBZ was moving Ubuntu's bug tracking over to Launchpad. The current situation sees bugs in main being filed in bugzilla while bugs in universe go in Launchpad. Putting all the bugs in Launchpad is an improvement, since users only need to go to one system to file bugs.

I wrote the majority of the conversion script before the conference, but made a few important improvements at the conference after discussions with some of the developers. Since the bug tracking system is probably of interest to people who weren't at the conf, I'll outline some of the details of the conversion below:

  • We are only migrating the open bugs -- the existing bugzilla will remain available to read those bugs though.

  • Any bugzilla user account associated with an open bug (asignee, reporter, cc, qa contact or commenter) will be imported into Launchpad. If you already have a Launchpad account but use a different email for your bugzilla account, you have the following options:

    1. Add your bugzilla email to your Launchpad account.
    2. In bugzilla, change your email to one of the addresses registered to your Launchpad account.
    3. After the migration, merge the extra account into your existing account.

    Note that passwords are not migrated, because Launchpad uses a different password hashing algorithm to Bugzilla

  • All comments and attachments are imported.

  • Bugs are filed against the appropriate package under the "Ubuntu" distribution in Launchpad.

  • A bug watch is created, pointing at the original Bugzilla bug, so you can see any information not migrated.

  • If the bug was marked UPSTREAM and a bug tracker URL is included in the bugzilla URL field, then we attempt to create a bug task against the upstream product and link it to the remote bug. This depends on the upstream product existing and being linked to the package, so doesn't always succeed. This feature was implemented to keep Sebastien happy, 68% of the UPSTREAM bugs are assigned to him.

  • Some of the bugzilla bugs are actually imported from debbugs. For these bugs, a bug task will be filed against Debian linked to the appropriate debbugs bug.

There are a few other things that need completing on the production Launchpad server before we can do the migration, but we should have a test import done on the staging server tomorrow some time.

Comments:

Chris Samuel -

It's been a few weeks now - how's this going ?

cheers! Chris

James Henstridge -

Things have progressed a little slower than anticipated. Performing the import on the production database depends on some other data being imported first (the packaging history for Ubuntu warty, hoary, breezy and dapper).

The good news is that we will be importing all the bugs now, not just the open ones, so that bugzilla.ubuntu.com can eventually be switched off.