import from github/gitlab issues

Question

import from github/gitlab issues

r2evans opened this issue 6 years ago · comments

In concert with (but not necessarily wholly dependent on) #7, what are your thoughts to a form of connection using github webhooks and/or gitlab api?

For instance, imagine a webhook or helper script that syncs all current GH/GL issues with the current git-issues project, whether standalone or in the special branch suggested in my comment in #7.

Use-case: I travel often, and I'm either too cheap to buy on-plane internet access or it is unreliable. I'd like to be able to have a solid listing of my issues with comments and supporting artifacts. My current method is to go through each issue and print to a PDF, which is both cumbersome and prone to print-layout artifacts. (And the supporting artifacts are not necessarily attached.)

I see this potentially being done one or two ways:

manually with git issue import; the remote url could easily be saved/cached, similar to git remote; there would need to be internal differentiation between GH and GL.
```
git issue import git@github.com:r2evans/myproj
# optionally but not strictly necessary
git push origin issues:issues
```
programmatically, where the GH/GL-hosted project has a trigger script (webhook or CI yml script) that automatically updates the issues branch when an issues is created/modified.
```
git pull origin issues:issues
```

Thoughts?

Diomidis Spinellis · Answer 1 · Sat Apr 21 2018 02:02:03 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

This is a very good idea! It would also allow transition from GitHub issues to Git issues. I think the manual git issue import route (probably implemented in a separate helper script) is preferable to the push-based one, because the push-based one can be built upon the manual one.

r2evans · Answer 2 · Sat Apr 21 2018 03:30:22 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Frankly, I think there would need to be an interface to push locally-created issues back to GH/GL, otherwise either (a) git issue needs to be read-only, or (b) the local issues would be a superset of those on GH/GL, not an ideal situation. (This suggests git issue export-like functionality.)

Diomidis Spinellis · Answer 3 · Sat Apr 21 2018 15:21:16 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I fully agree. With "push" I meant a mechanism for pushing issues from GH/GL into a Git issues repo.

Diomidis Spinellis · Answer 4 · Sat Apr 21 2018 15:22:38 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

So GH/GL issues should appear like a git-issue (special) remote repo, which you can clone, pull, and push.

r2evans · Answer 5 · Sun Apr 22 2018 03:46:28 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I might be able to work a PR for this as well as #9.

However, this patch will need to add either curl and jq (robust json parser) or switch to python (that has both network and json built in). Preference?

Diomidis Spinellis · Answer 6 · Sun Apr 22 2018 04:06:18 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Great! I think the Unix shell is not an appropriate tool for writing the import/export code. A good approach would be an external Python helper program to do the GitHub API heavy lifting. Keeping the script compatible with Python 2.7 and avoiding external dependencies would be ideal.

r2evans · Answer 7 · Sun Apr 22 2018 04:25:47 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I'm more proficient in py3, would that be okay, or is there specific reason to stay with 2?

Diomidis Spinellis · Answer 8 · Sun Apr 22 2018 05:46:44 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Unfortunately, I see that many OS distributions either come with Python 2 being the default or only with Python 2. Therefore, to keep the spirit of hassle-free installation, providing Python 2 compatible code would be ideal. Could you perhaps try to write Python 3 code that's backward compatible with Python 2?

Diomidis Spinellis · Answer 9 · Tue Jun 05 2018 14:03:01 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

@r2evans ping: Do you have a draft time plan for the implementation? Do you need me to add any features to make the job easier? I see that we have assignee and tags, but we're missing projects and milestones.

r2evans · Answer 10 · Wed Jun 06 2018 00:32:11 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Haven't had much time recently, still planning on working it. The first priority for me was to work on #9. For this one, I've been playing a little with python-gitlab, and since it supports API v4, we're good against GitLab's deprecation of v3. I have not looked at PyGithub much, and the documentation is extremely sparse, so it's tertiary for me.

Diomidis Spinellis · Answer 11 · Tue Aug 28 2018 18:15:00 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Working on it.

Diomidis Spinellis · Answer 12 · Wed Aug 29 2018 05:17:12 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Import existing issues
Update issues
Import issue comments
Import milestone
Clever merge with conflict resolution
CI testing

r2evans · Answer 13 · Thu Sep 06 2018 23:43:33 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Sorry I've been unresponsive since our last discussions, both for this and #9. I've been really jammed (with my paying job) and haven't had an opportunity to address this yet.

Diomidis Spinellis · Answer 14 · Fri Sep 07 2018 01:16:04 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

No problem! I enjoyed working on it.

Philipp Middendorf · Answer 15 · Fri Sep 14 2018 16:20:57 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I'd like to import issues from GitLab just once, to migrate to git issue. Is that possible (possibly using some branch) currently?

Diomidis Spinellis · Answer 16 · Sat Sep 15 2018 00:48:33 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

I'm not familiar with the GitLab API. If it's similar to the GitHub one, then it should be easy to adapt the GitHub import functionality to GitLab (e.g. by changing the API endpoints).

Diomidis Spinellis · Answer 17 · Sat Feb 01 2020 06:33:05 GMT+0800 (China Standard Time)

Implemented by @vyrondrosos as part of GSoC 2019.