South 0.6

It is with great pleasure (and a measurable sense of relief) that I announce the release of South 0.6, a new release bringing quite a few new features, although most of them aren't immediately obvious.

Perhaps the biggest change is the move from parsing source files to get the field definitions (ugh, I know) to introspecting the fields to get their definitions. As well as being more stable and making my skin crawl less, this also means that dynamically-created models and fields are now fully supported.

South still falls back on the parser module for custom fields if it has to - since it doesn't know how to introspect them - but we encourage you to implement a South-readable interface for custom fields; see our wiki page explaining how to do that.

The other noticeable change is that the migrate command is much zippier, thanks mostly to the hard work and lazy-evaluation-patches of Juan and Simon from Akoha. Note that the SQL for migrations is no longer printed out as they're running any more - it was getting a bit verbose - but you can re-enable it with --verbosity=2. You can also completely shut South up using --verbosity=0, if you desire.

For easier conversion, there's a new one-shot convert_to_south command - take care to read the wiki page on that, however, as the caveat is that you must run a migrate --fake on any other computers running the same codebase. We're going to make that a bit more intuitive for the next release.

The release notes contain the rest of the changes - some big, some small - and remember, we've switched to Mercurial for revision control, so if you're still running off Subversion please change your checkouts.

Posted 11th August 2009 in Python, Django, and South, with 7 comments