Future of migrate in core in a post Drupal 7 world

Created on 20 February 2020, almost 5 years ago
Updated 23 July 2024, 5 months ago

Problem/Motivation

There has been some discussion about what the future of migrate is once Drupal 7 marketshare is sufficiently reduced and it no longer makes sense to maintain the Drupal 6/7 migrations in core.

I don’t actually believe that d7 marketshare will be low enough by Drupal 10 to remove the migrate_drupal module, but it will happen eventually. One of the thresholds we’ve used as to whether a feature goes in contrib or in core is whether it directly supports the core mission of providing Drupal 6/7 migrations into drupal 8, so what happens once that system is no longer needed?

Proposed resolution

Discuss the future of migrate in Drupal Core in a post Drupal 7 world

Summary of discussion

Migrate API

  • Move back to contrib
  • OR

  • Make the API robust (whether that is soong or not)
    • Proved useful for pulling data into core. lowers the barriers to entiry to Drupal when coming from other systsm.
    • Keep destination plugins, base process and migration plugins. source plugins can be deprecated
    • Bring more migrate plus and tools into core
    • Define a new threshold for what’s allowed in core, otherwise we risk a bloat of very specialized process plugins, among other things. The new criterion could be to support migrations from JSON:API (the actual API, not the module that implements it in Drupal).

migrate_drupal, migrate_drupal_ui

  • Move to contrib when D7 market share drops 'enough'
🌱 Plan
Status

Active

Version

11.0 πŸ”₯

Component
MigrationΒ  β†’

Last updated 21 minutes ago

Created by

πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡ΈUnited States mikelutz Michigan, USA

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  • πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡ΈUnited States mikelutz Michigan, USA
  • πŸ‡¬πŸ‡§United Kingdom catch

    I think there might be another issue about this somewhere, we should at least link the two.

    Couple of thoughts:

    We are hoping to support Drupal 10 until 2026 or even 2027 (see 🌱 [policy] Decide how long major Drupal versions should be supported Needs review ). This means Drupal 10's migrate_drupal with Drupal 6 and 7 support will be supported between 1 to 2 years beyond the Drupal 7 EOL.

    Additionally, the original Drupal 7 EOL was set for when 9.5.0/10.0.0 was released at the end of 2022. If that date had stood, then we'd have been supporting a migration from Drupal 7 for a full major release cycle after its EOL - it's only the extensions which make it seems 'shorter', but 2026-26 is 4-5 years after that original EOL date.

    For me this is plenty of time for sites to migrate, and I don't think we should be supporting Drupal 7 migrations in Drupal 11 core which could be supported until 2028 or 2029.

    Once Drupal 10 itself is EOL, there seems to be two possibilities, for the tens or possibly hundreds of thousands sites that will still be on Drupal 7 at that time and whatever percentage of them actually still want to migrate to Drupal 10+.

    1. We could do like we have with other core modules, and move migrate_drupal as well as the migrations to contrib in Drupal 11. This is likely to be quite a lot of work (although I guess at least there's no hook_update_N() to test unless we change migrate's own schemas). That way sites could continue to migrate Drupal 7 to Drupal 11 as long as someone is prepared to keep the contrib module running.

    2. We could deprecate the migrations/migrate_drupal for removal with no contrib replacement. The option then for sites that still want to migrate off Drupal 7, would be to migrate to unsupported-but-still-working Drupal 10, then upgrade from Drupal 10 to Drupal 11 before they actually launch.

  • πŸ‡³πŸ‡ΏNew Zealand quietone

    I am in agreement with #14. And I prefer #1, moving Migrate Drupal and Migrate Drupal UI to contrib. Work has already started on that and I am looking forward to doing more work on that in the coming months. Although, like you say we need someone to maintain the contrib modules πŸ“Œ Tasks to deprecate Migrate Drupal Postponed .

    I still prefer Migrate API to remain in core and doing some improvements to it.

  • πŸ‡³πŸ‡ΏNew Zealand quietone

    Migrate drupal and Migrate drupal ui are going to be removed from core without replacement.

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