December IMP update

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eliza411's picture

The December holiday season is traditionally a little slower than the rest of the year, but it didn’t stand in the way of steady progress for IMP!

Major milestone achievement/s:

The first complete config entity migration, #2150407 Migrate D6 roles and permissions, was committed to core (Thanks, alexpott!). This patch introduced the entity destination in a very minimal state, the first two process-specific plugins, and a unit-tested source plug in as well.

Steady progress:

Steady progress continued with improved documentation and support for writing D6 to D8 migrations.

benjy joined the team and wrote the migrations for view modes, field formatter settings and field widget settings. We learned a lot during this and began to see our scope much cleaner: some of the field modules are added to D8 with a limited set of functionality so we need to limit functionality too.

YesCT continued on cleaning up the MigrateExecutable / SQL IdMap (basically, the Drupal 7 code we took almost verbatim) docs cleanup. It’s very close to ready.

The Migration process plugin has seen much needed cleanup, following discussions with Mike Ryan and andypost. There’s some work outstanding, but it’s functional. It currently lives in the field formatter issue.

There are a couple issues waiting to be committed: variables to config, contact categories and taxonomy vocabularies. Similar simple migrations are expected to continue at a steady rate.

Reflections from chx:

In general, I am surprised how simple migrations turn out to be, especially compared to the horrors of the upgrade path. Of course, using existing APIs really ought to be simpler than rewriting them but still, this is a surprise. Also, I am surprised how well the migration architecture has been holding up so far. We needed very few custom process plugins and necessary ones are very, very short (like three lines of code or less).

It’s now crystal clear the biggest challenge to come is updating entities. For example, you migrate nodes first then you add the terms to them — and the latter will need to be able to set a single field. It is not yet clear how we will signal that a) an update is needed b) the missing fields are not to be removed. Another issue will be dependencies between migrations — one can’t migrate field formatters before the field entities themselves are in place.

Great! How close are we to being able to run D6 migrations?

There’s plenty still to be done before we can run a full D6 to D8 migration. Porting the test runner from migrate to core is the major to-do item, and there are existing issues for individual migrations at https://drupal.org/node/2150405. New migration tasks will be added to that meta-issue as their specific requirements are determined.

How can I help?

Visit the IMP group on http://groups.drupal.org/imp for current priorities. Right now, we’re continuing with D6 to D8 migrations. You can also find us in IRC in Freenode’s #drupal-contribute channel and of course, in the core issue queue.

Weekly calls to discuss architectural and development questions, align the roadmap, and discuss next steps resume on January 9. Contact eliza411 to be added to the calendar invite.

IMP

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