Create source for Drupal 6 CCK sites

I think this use case is a little narrow to be packaged with Migrate itself. There are two efforts in this area I can speak to:

1. I've done a little proof-of-concept work on a Drupal equivalent of WordPress migrate, a generic module to support Drupal-to-Drupal imports. That is based on RESTful services rather than direct DB import, though. I'm not sure if/when it will emerge as a contrib project.
2. On a project we both worked on, @q0rban developed some code to do direct database Drupal 6->Drupal 7 imports along the lines of your conception. Perhaps he can speak to that here (or if not, I can dig up the code and try to figure it out:-).

Note that both of these approaches involve services on the source side (q0rban had JSON services returning field metadata).

I am also struggling. I have a d6 site with article, cck image field, tags, title, and maybe book structure. Looking for guidance on pulling alll nodes straight into a fresh d7 install. I have looked at feeds and csv imports but all seem to strip out body text tags eg h2. Can you give any first steps guidance or point to any documentation. I have always bottled this in the past and spent a day manually copy and pasting between two browser windows!

Rather than a custom service, I used the services module on the D6 side, with the attached migrate_service module to configure the source side. On the destination side, I created an extension of the JSON source plugin (attached as drupal_source.inc), and in the term migration (which is as far as I got with this little proof-of-concept) set up the source thusly:

    $this->source = new DrupalSource($this->getEndpoint(), $this->getToken(),
      'taxonomy_term', 'tid', $fields);

Hope this helps a bit.

I have not looked closely at it, but migrate_remote looks pretty on topic here - http://drupal.org/sandbox/fgm/1138504. If you try it, let us know what it does :)

Yes, the hardcoded page size was an annoyance I ran into. Thought I had put in a feature request but it seems not; however, the topic has been picked up and there is a patch in the queue: #1186738: add pagesize to services_resource_build_index_query

Another services-based approach: Content API.

See also #1234528: Include a module with classes to migrate content from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. And, the core issue #1052692: New import API for major version upgrades (was migrate module) is also relevant - assuming we go ahead with that (D7->D8 core upgrade using Migrate API), I'll certainly try to make it general enough to easily be repurposed for D6->D8, and easily be backported in contrib for D?->D? migrations.

But, that's a long-term solution. In the short-term, I think the most general answer is to extend services to deliver what we want from the source side, and develop the Migrate classes I started on for the destination side. I do usually want to migrate directly from the source database if at all possible, but a services-based approach would be useful in cases where that isn't practical, and I don't really want to develop both SQL-based and XML-based migrations for this use case. Unlike external CMS cases, where you may be forced to use some lousy XML service that does more to obscure than illuminate the data, we actually have some influence on the source side.

Not usre how relevant this is, but http://drupal.org/sandbox/frjo/1332996 has some d6 sources

I actually have an approach of my own in the works, more general than frjo's, I'm hoping to be far enough along to make a sandbox in January.

http://drupal.org/sandbox/mikeryan/1234554 this?

Yes, forgot I had reserved the sandbox a while ago. I've got a hot D6-to-D7 project on my plate now, hoping to fill in that sandbox within the next couple of weeks.

related slightly: #1338648: Migrating directly from D5 to D7

See http://drupal.org/sandbox/mikeryan/1234554.

@Mike: git push?

It is there: http://drupalcode.org/sandbox/mikeryan/1234554.git/commit/1834114

Right, sorry, was looking in the master branch. stupid me.