Item — HN Reader

Hi Andrew, congrats on the campaign and reaching your goal so quickly! And thank you for South! I've been using South for some years and it would be impossible to imagine working on a Django project wihout it. Two quick questions:

- Are there any South "Good practices" books which you would recommend? South's documentation is great, but it might be interesting to look at some real-world project examples to learn a few new tricks.

- I'm interested in particular in data migration development practices. How do other developers go about developing and testing them? I've discovered that by raising an Exception during the data migration, South will rollback the specific migration, allowing me to iteratively test/debug the migration until it seems bug-free and ready. Are there any other ways to do it (would running the data migration with the "fake" option allow me full read access to the database, but would rollback / skip any writes?).

Thank you for your time!

3 comments

There was an interesting chat-log[1] someone posted on /r/Django on reddit talking about dealing with South migration merging/conflicts, and other issues that crop up in a multi-person project.

I'm curious about the best practices for data-migrations as well; I've seen a few places[2][3] suggest that wrapping your fixture loading "./manage.py loaddata <fixture>" in datamigrations is better than leaving it up to initial_data.{yaml,json}

Edit: here's the one I was thinking of: South common pitfalls: http://andrewingram.net/2012/dec/common-pitfalls-django-sout...

[1] https://gist.github.com/sjl/4438002

[2] http://djangosnippets.org/snippets/2897/

[3] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5472925/django-loading-da...

Hi Greg,

There's no books or anything, alas, nor is there a very good corpus of material on this field - there's a few good talks out there, but I've not seen a great deal of written material.

Perhaps I need to write a book as well? Not sure I need another Kickstarter, though!

I would checkout Scala-Migrations for guidance. https://code.google.com/p/scala-migrations/