Code review comment for lp:~shevonar/widelands-website/django1.4

>Then you run the migration scripts that usually fail somewhere halfway through - you have a database in a weird state then. You pick up the pieces, massage the db so that the update scripts run through.

Well, presumably this is run in some dev/test environment so we can go back and rework the migration scripts to work better. If the migration scripts fail halfway through, they are not finished/complete.

The real work here is making sure we test/exercise enough of the code base to make sure we don't have any necessary migrations we aren't aware of lurking in the corners. Smoketesting is a given here, but may miss some edge cases. I see there are some test suites in the repository, but I don't know they coverage rate of them. The production migration should not take place until we have verified the migration scripts run and that the site works without any problems afterwards.

I'm not familiar with it, but I spotted the dependency on South which seems quite capable of dealing with migrations. (Actually autogenerating the necessary migrations based on changes to the models: http://south.readthedocs.org/en/latest/tutorial/part1.html!) If the only necessary database changes needed are the two mentioned by Shevonar above, it looks rather feasible *knocks on wood*. I think someone should take a closer look at South and try to create some migrations based on the information linked to above.