Migration

This post is about my (successful) attempt to migrate my Bugzilla installation from MySQL/MariaDB to PostgreSQL.

15 years ago I migrated this website to the popular CMS Drupal. At first I loved Drupal, it was a nice and shiny tool for managing my content without having to deal with designing the appearance of the site. Over the years, however, I realized that running a dynamic website also has a cost, and that cost is keeping the software that drives the site up-to-date. With Drupal that cost is substantial: Security updates are constantly pouring in, and upgrading Drupal to a major new version invariably also means a major amount of work to be done.

This is a longish story about how I migrated my photo library from Apple's discontinued iPhoto application to the open source program digikam (version 5.9.0 beta from March 2018). If you follow a similar migration path and make the same decisions as I did on what data to keep and what data to discard, then I hope you will find a reusable solution in this story. These are the pieces:

• An AppleScript for the initial iPhoto export
• A shell script for post-processing and preparing the exported data for the digikam import
• The instructions how to configure digikam to make the import work
• Optional cleanup work and sync'ing back of metadata to image files

A warning before you dig in: Although I have tried to explain everything in as much detail as I could, you should be prepared for surprises and an arduous migration - it certainly was for me.

A few months ago, after a brief encounter with svk, I became interested in distributed version control systems (or DSCMs). I soon decided that I wanted to move away from Subversion - not because I didn't like SVN anymore, but because I saw an interesting new technical challenge, and also because I thought (and still think) that knowing how to work with a DSCM is a valuable skill to employers. After a brief comparison of the most prominent open source DSCMs (Bazaar, Git, Mercurial), I decided to go with Read more…