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Comment by gamegoblin | Hacker News Reader

I started coding Django a couple of months ago and was blown away when I attempted to add a field to an existing model only to get yelled at. StackOverflow comments told me that South was the only way to go. I guess I just couldn't believe it wasn't an already existing feature. It seems that adding fields is common enough to be needed early on...

Happy about the news!

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In the past (not sure about now) the Django docs (and thus, I have to assume, the devs) were somewhat against automated migrations. The rationale was that the developer should understand his or her data models and do migrations manually to avoid problems caused by mistakes made by the migration machinery. Obviously this attitude has changed, perhaps because of the success of South and the fact that most people would rather have the process automated, even if it causes occasional weirdness.

It was documented as something that was desired, but not something that would go into Django core until the dust settled as to what the best approach was; it's not something to hurry into.

What's been implemented now is significantly better than what South had. If they'd just decided to adopt South, that wouldn't have happened. Thus, it's good that it happened. :-)

> I guess I just couldn't believe it wasn't an already existing feature.

It existed. Django is able to generate SQL DDL on a per-app basis since the first versions. The problem is that people wanted an automatic way of doing that, but there a couple of different approaches. South (and the proposed built-in feature) is not the best approach to everybody.

I too was amazed when I first tried out Django to find out that there was no way to change my model, migrate and test. I guess that's one of the things they don't teach you upon experiencing ORM for the first time.

I'd be curious to read that question... I have also been working Django on the side and have encountered migration issues.

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