South 0.5

I'm pleased to announce the release of South 0.5; this has been a long and exciting release, with many new features...

• ORM Freezing, a new feature inspired by Migratory, which lets you freeze the historical state of your current models into a migration so you can then use them via an ORM as if your models.py file existed at that point in time. There's a good description of how exactly this is used in part 3 of the new tutorial.
• Automatic change detection; using the frozen model states, South can now diff your current models.py file against how it looked last time you made a migration, and write a migration to make up the difference. This essentially allows django-evolution style hinting, and means you'll only have to manually write more advanced migrations. It's discussed more in part two of the new tutorial.
• A much more robust models.py parser, using the Python parser module. It's a dirty secret that South automatically makes migrations by directly examining your models' source code; however, the new parsing engine hits 99% of all Django use cases, and has provisions for custom hooks so more wacky fields (such as django-denorm's decorated-function-based-fields) can tell South their equivalent definitions.
• A move into a south/ subdirectory, to fit with Python packaging guidelines, and make South more friendly with environments such as buildout and pip.

I've been very excited about the new features for a while, as those who have talked to me will tell you, and thanks to those people who used the trunk releases and submitted a great set of bug reports, it's finally ready for general consumption!

Additionally, for those going to EuroDjangoCon, don't miss my talk on migrations next Monday; as well as South and its new features, I'll be covering and comparing django-evolution and a few other migration solutions.

Happy migrating!

Posted 27th April 2009 in Python, Django, and South, with 7 comments