(Note: This post was published in May 2026, over a year after it was written.)
For more than twenty years I have been self-hosting the Internet services that were consumed by my and my wife’s household as well as by my hobby programming activities: Email, calendars + contacts, version control, bug tracking, and - last but not least - this and a couple of other websites.
Alas, this self-hosting project has now come to an end.
This is just a quick note that all of my software projects that up until now were still hosted on my dedicated server have now been moved to GitHub. These are the affected projects:
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. The latest upgrade to Drupal 8 in 2018, for instance, took me about two weeks to complete!
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:
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 Git.
Today I finally completed the migration from Subversion to Git repositories. The following links are in operation as of now:
