In the last 5 years, we used a bug tracker called Mantis. Mantis is a great project and makes bug tracking really easy. Approximately one year ago, we switched our projects from SVN to Git and chose GitLab (private instance) as our platform. GitLab is awesome, but that’s not the topic of this post. We quickly realized that GitLab also supports issue tracking and it’s (surprisingly 😉) much more deeply integrated than we could ever achieve with Mantis. GitLab offers some project importers, e.g., GitHub, Bitbucket, but Mantis wasn’t an option. So I googled around for a few days but could not find a tool that was not marked as experimental.
A few weeks later, I searched for a bug in CMake and saw that Kitware (the company behind CMake) also uses GitLab and the GitLab issue tracker. I clicked on the issue I was searching for and saw the following line:
This issue was created automatically from an original Mantis Issue. Further discussion may take place here.
Kitware also used Mantis before GitLab, and it seems they built a converter for it. I sent an email about the tool to the mailing list and got back a link to the tool that converts Mantis issues to GitLab issues. The project has two Python 2 scripts but only a “what is it” readme file, but if you look into the code, it is really easy to find out how the tool works. After one week of preparation, I converted all Mantis projects we have to GitLab issues thanks to this great tool from Kitware.
So if you ever come to the same situation, here is the link to the mantis-to-gitlab tool they built.
UPDATE: Time flies. There is also a fork of mantis-to-gitlab that works with more recent versions of GitLab.
Kitware, thank you very much, you are awesome.