Southerly Breezes

Work on South has been going full steam ahead lately, with some good results.

Two major features that I've been wanting to implement for ages are now in SVN trunk, and due for imminent release with South 0.5. They are:

  • ORM Freezing: Much like the strangely similar feature of Migratory (which is what inspired this), South now has the ability to 'freeze' models to make them accessible inside the migration, so you can write data migrations more easily. Things like fake models needed for the other ends of ForeignKeys (when creating tables and the like) are also now implemented using the same system, to make things cleaner.
  • Automatic change detection: Before this was impossible, but now, if you freeze all of an app's models into a migration, South can compare that with the current state and automatically write a migration for the changes that have occurred. There's a setting to automatically freeze the app into every migration to make this more usable, too.

I'm very excited about these new features; they should make the next release of South one not to be missed. There's also other changes under the hood, as well, including a new, much more robust models.py parser. Documentation for these features is up already, and the tutorial will be extended (given a second part) soon, in order to cover them - they're features we want everyone using, since they'll save you time, and, hopefully stress.

If you feel like testing the new features before the next release, just check out trunk and have a play. Your feedback is also more than welcome on our new South mailing list, which you should also have a look at.

Posted 10th March 2009 in Django, and South, with 7 comments

comments

  1. Travis Jeffery

    fantastics looking forward -- thanks
  2. Marc Remolt

    I was closely following every bit of news concerning migrations and django till the 0.9.6 days.
    Some months ago (short after djangocon) I stopped testing every new migration lib and reading the mailing lists on that topic.

    The reason for this is your fantastic south app. There simply is no reason to look for an usable migration system anymore, it already is there.

    Thanks for your hard work.

    Marc
  3. Lukasz Dziedzia

    Sounds great!

    Thanks for your good work,

    Lukasz

  4. Jittat

    That ORM Freezer is exactly what I need.

  5. Jittat

    (forgot to thank!)

  6. Andreas Pelme

    Great stuff, this will save me some time when writing migrations!

  7. Preston

    Thanks for keeping the work going on a solid migrations project for Django, I feel this is one of the most important areas for me in feeling comfortable with Django for my style of development.


  8. (optional)