562308 - importxml.pl should import each comment separately, rather than concatenating them all into a single one

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Bugzilla :: Bug Import/Export & Moving, enhancement)

Description

[Fabian Groffen]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.4; en; rv:1.9.0.18) Gecko/2010021619 Camino/2.0.2 (like Firefox/3.0.18)
Build Identifier: Bugzilla-3.6

importxml.pl currently aggregates all comments into the description field of the bug, with text markings to report on the original reporter (who) and time of the imported comments.  The reason behind this seems to be (from comments) that original reporters may not exist in the system being imported in.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. save xml output of a bug
2. importxml.pl that output

Actual Results:  
see comments being aggregated as a single message in the description of the imported bug

Expected Results:  
allow in some way to post separate comments to the bug to as close as possible reproduce the original bug.

I have a patch which implements this behaviour based on a command line switch "--post_comments".  I will attach the patch in the next comment.

Comment 1

[Fabian Groffen]

Attachment: importxml post-comments implementation

Patch to implement posting real comments to each bug, instead of aggregating in the description.  I decided to retain the original behaviour, as it probably has some good usage too.  Result is a bit if/then/else-like code.

If separate comments are to be posted, each reporter is looked up.  If they don't exist, a remark is prepended to the comment message with the original reporter id/email and the reporter is set to the exporter's id.  The status message about the import is made a final comment on the bug as well in --post_comments mode.

Comment 2

[Frédéric Buclin]

Comment on attachment 442050 [details] [diff] [review]
importxml post-comments implementation

Putting this patch in our radar.

Comment 3

[Frédéric Buclin]

I'm actually interested to see this implemented. I will go even farther and say that there is no need for a switch. This should be the default behavior. And I like you proposal: use the original comment reporter, else fall back to the exporter.

Fabian, are you interested in updating your patch this way?

Comment 4

[Frédéric Buclin]

Comment on attachment 442050 [details] [diff] [review]
importxml post-comments implementation

Cancelling request for review per my previous comment. When you attach your updated patch, feel free to ask me for review. I would be happy to test your patch. :)

Comment 5

[Fabian Groffen]

I only needed this for a one-time conversion phase.  I hereby allow you to change the patch in any way to suit your liking.  I think it's fairly straight-forward to remove all the if-cases to make post-comments the only option, or just to add an "aggregate-comments" option to achieve the inverse.

If you really need me to update the patch for you to commit it, tell me exactly how you want it, and I'll attach it.

Comment 6

[Frédéric Buclin]

OK, that's fine. I will do it. Thanks :)

Comment 7

[Frédéric Buclin]

Attachment: patch, v1

My patch also fixes another bug I found while testing it. %X writes the time in the 12 hours format, instead of the 24h format (i.e. 4pm was displayed as 04:00:00 instead of 16:00:00). So we want %T here.

Comment 8

[Frédéric Buclin]

Committing to: bzr+ssh://[e-mail]/bugzilla/trunk/
modified importxml.pl
Committed revision 7528.

Comment 9

[Frédéric Buclin]

Added to relnotes in bug 713346.