in our software department the people work since about 15 Years (!) on the same kind of software projects. The bug tracking system we use is as old. I evaluated mantis and believe it is much, much, much more powerful, stable, faster and easier to use.
The problem is, that our old bug tracking system bye now has about 25000 issues (!) stored. If we change the system, we need an easy to use, stable and fast migration feature. I've read many items or work arounds concerning this, but I somehow don't see that a useful feature exists.
I think this case is representative for many, many industrial needs and a feature like this would help a lot to increase the interests in this great tool.
Is the current system that you are using a 'homegrown' solution? There's no real way of doing a complete migration application due to the extreme differences in other solutions. In reality, you could only target certain systems.
Having said that, the Mantis code itself provides a great API. There's no reason why you couldn't (with a little massaging of data) write a PHP script that will systematically grab data from the current solution, change it for Mantis then record it.
If you didn't want to write the converter in PHP, you could use any number of languages and use the MantisConnect webservice to populate Mantis.
Like I say, if you were using a 'standard' solution, then it might be possible to get someone to write a converter but if it's homegrown, I'm guessing that you would have to write one yourself or pay someone to do it. I'm sure you can understand that the developers wouldn't want to get bogged down writing converters for hundreds of in-house solutions that by their very nature would only be used the one time!
If you need help doing so, I'm sure there are lots of people here that could offer you assistance though...
thank you for the reply. The system we have is not home made. Of course we would easily be able to extract all data in any format mantis would accept.
To write some PHP scripts ourselfs would mean efforts we would like to save, because we don't have anybody with expert PHP know how and buy someone is to costly these days. The webservice interface is also not very easy to use. No, I would expect a file or program interface. The data from the old system we can extract in any file format mantis would use. A batch interface like this would also be useful for automatically generated issues, for example after automatic nightly regression tests.
Maybe this is a too bold opinion of mine and I really don't want to bother You guys in any way. If You think this is stupid, just tell me.
