After months of hard work, refactoring, blood, sweat, tears, and improvement, South 0.7 is ready.
This release has been probably the biggest internal change in South since it first started. We've removed a lot of old code, and significantly refactored the migration-creating code to make it more extensible (as well as not being mostly in one 3000 line file)
There are also a few new user-facing changes:
**New command names.**The old startmigration was getting a little overloaded and wasn't too well-named, so it's been split into schemamigration and datamigration commands. There's also a new graphmigrations command, for those with complex dependency sets.
No more issues with missing defaults. South realises you need a default for NOT NULL columns now, and prompts you if you forget to specify one as you're making the migration, instead of dying when you try to apply it.
Django 1.2 and MultiDB support. As well as supporting the latest and greatest incarnation of the universe's best web framework, 0.7 also has some limited MultiDB support, in the form of a --database option (that works like the option of the same name on the new syncdb command in Django).
Custom fields are no longer magically used. Instead, you now have to actually tell South about them. It's an ease-of-use regression, which I'm not too keen on - but it's needed to stop things mysteriously failing in your migrations a few weeks down the line, and there's a whole new tutorial section on it, as well as plenty of reference documentation (and IRC and the mailing list are always around to help).
If you want more information, read the new long-form release notes, which goes into a bit more detail on the various changes, and mentions a few I haven't included here.
There'll be a lull in development after the release as I rest, and then work will begin on the next release - 1.0*. Which features are going to appear have not yet been decided, but it's highly likely column rename support and a fixturemigration command will be among them.
Anyway, why are you waiting? Go install South 0.7 now!
* South has an octal numbering system.