bromer

This is not intended to be a rant or even close to it. But I find myself with a problem so obvious that I’m annoyed by the lack of solution. I can’t be the only developer with this problem.

I use South to handle database structure migration and it works (for the most part) very well, and I’m happy to use it. One problem though. When you actually need to migrate backward and forward many times you will run into problems with missing fields in your Django models. Say, so have a field called “person” on a random model. You wish to rename this to “full_name”, so you write the straight forward migration to handle this and remove the field from your model. Now, if you wish to migrate back your code is outdated. This mean that you’ll be unable to use your Django system to inspect things or whatever you might wish to do.

The solution – from my point of view – for all of us using some versioning tool would be to bind the migration to a changeset and have the forward and backward migrations update the code as well. This is a bit more demanding to set up, but it’s properly the only solution you have if you want the possibility to migrate back and have a useable system.

If only I had the time to take a proper look at South to find the solution.