DrupalCon NOLA Tuesday call to action - migration sprints

Again, in the interests of timeliness I'll stick to a simple chronological wrapup of the day. And in the interests of of-course-everyone-cares-what-Mike-eats, I will continue subjecting you to my culinary adventures - breakfast at the Clover Grill in the midst of tourist land (Bourbon Street). Good, basic diner food - eggs over easy with bacon and hash browns, the primary goal here was to make it quick and get to the convention center in time for the prenote (which I have somehow never managed to rouse myself in time for at previous DrupalCons).

And, as always (by reputation), the prenote was an extravaganza hosted by jam. So much energy on the stage, so many songwriters calling their lawyers... Highlights were Gábor unveiling a sweet, soulful voice, and the epic Code of Conduct song (performed 1.5 times, so no excuses for not getting it down).

That brings us to - ta-da! - DriesNote. As always, a lot of information presented succintly - I'm sure others will cover many of his points, so I'll focus on my special interest - migration. In Dries' annual survey, site builders identified migration tools as their biggest need for Drupal 8, and he called out the Friday migration sprint.

Sprint all the migrates!

So... let's see how much progress we can make on core migration issues this week! Important things to note:

  1. You don't have to wait for Friday. The Sprint Lounge (rooms 275-277) is open every day. And, while as usual I checked off many, many sessions I'd like to attend, after sitting in a couple today where (through no fault of the presenters) I was mainly thinking about migration, I'm going to try to spend significant time every day (right up through Sunday morning) sprinting.
  2. You don't have to be in New Orleans! You can help remotely - drop into the #drupal-migrate IRC channel, or just pick issues from the core queue and dive in on your own.
  3. You don't have to know the migration framework - there are various ways you can help out (see below).

We already have 10 people officially signed up for migration sprinting (between the core and multilingual lists), so (particularly with more people joining) we can afford to split into multiple sprint teams:

  • Backwards-compability breakers - try to address any issues that may affect backwards-compability, so migration implementors will be able to count on a stable API from 8.2.x forward. This was my priority coming in, and you'll find triaged issues on the Sprint triage tab of the Migration sprint spreadsheet.
  • I18n issues - penyaskito is already leading a migration sprint in this area - it overlaps with the BC-breakers on the epic Migrate D6 i18n nodes issue.
  • Migrate criticals - note that this overlaps some with the BC-breakers (the BC-breaker list has its migrate-criticals listed first), so look for issues not already covered there.
  • UI issues - Abhishek Anand, who did some of the work on the UI in contrib, will lead efforts to clean up remaining issues in core. He'll be in the sprint room Wednesday morning, as well as most of the day Friday, and you can also coordinate with him outside of those times (or if you're not here).
  • We have a lot of issues at the Needs review stage - let's see how many we can get to RTBC, or give constructive feedback, so we can move forward on stuff like node and user references.

Specifically, how can I help?

  • If you're at DrupalCon NOLA, come to the sprint room (275-277) any time Wednesday-Friday - I'll try to get there early and reserve a table just for migration. There are a couple of sessions I definitely want to catch, but I should be there for most non-lunch time, and there should generally be others there (especially Friday) when I'm not.
  • If you're remote, you can announce your presence in #drupal-migrate on IRC. Or just pick an issue to work on.

Either way, please put your name under "Who's working on it" in the spreadsheet so we don't duplicate effort (multiple people can be involved in one patch, but should coordinate).

Ways to help on a specific issue:

  • Write a patch (or discuss approaches to a patch) where there is none yet.
  • Review an existing "needs review" patch.
  • Manually test a "needs review" patch - set up a patched D8 environment and try running your site through the migration process (we'll give some help on setup here).
  • Add tests to a patch tagged "Needs tests".
  • Help solve any outstanding issues on a "needs work" patch.
  • Any other ideas you might have...