For those who are looking for a quick read, here is the question:
My question is: has Atlassian decided on a final jira project key now?
Motivation of the question, with a bonus question at the end.
When we started with Jira 3.x we set up our project key pattern with an Atlassian vendor. There were no restrictions to those keys so we allowed something like VISJAS_13 as a key. Everything was legit as can be seen in the documentation over here: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/docs/v3.12/project_keys.html. Later it was added, that "-", lowercase and other things were "not recommended".
Migrating to Jira 4.4.4 was a pain. No numbers, no "-" or other special signs were allowed anymore. We had to migrate the complete underlying project structure to a new key pattern to get the migration done. It was possible to migrate to the new system. But the key validator now didn't check for our old pattern, but had some hardcoded checks for those characters set up.
It was simply not possible to use that pattern anymore. And chaning the pattern popped up messages that the new pattern wouldn't match the old projects. There was no way around to migrate those project keys (changing the Validator Class was not really considered an option).See: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA044/Configuring+Project+Keys
With our Jira 5.2.6 the project key now gets restricted to 10 characters O_o.
Fortunately we started using AA, AB, AC... using the Jira standard key pattern, so we are good with that. But the first thought back then was to exchange project keys to something like VISJASXXXIII. This would have sucked, because a migration of the project keys means that we lose our complete JIRA-CVS history.
Reading things like
The changing of project keys is not covered by Atlassian Support and is considered to be risky as this involved manually manipulating raw .xml data
taken from: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/JIRA/Changing+the+Project+Key
and
There are a lot of dependencies on the JIRA Project Key, both internal to JIRA and external. One of the benefits of the project and issue keys is that they provide a reference to a project or issue from inside and outside of JIRA.
taken from: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRA-2703 (open since 19/Nov/03 ...)
I feel somewhat mocked.
And why just 10 characters? Is Jira running out of DB space?
