[Python-modules-team] Bug#755649: Problem migrating from South to Django migrations for Linux distributions

[Raphael Hertzog]

Hi Andrew, 

thanks for your quick answer.

On Thu, 24 Jul 2014, Andrew Godwin wrote:
> There is no way around this; it's unfortunate that the packaging situation
> means that Django will get auto-upgraded as part of a distribution upgrade;
> I'm surprised that Debian hasn't had this with packages before? (Version
> upgrades that break installed but non-packaged things)

We probably had this kind of things before and the best we can do for
non-packaged things is usally to document this in the release notes.

But for packaged things, we try usually hard to get things to just work
without any human intervention. Hence my question.

> Neither of your suggested ways to go forward will work; the two history
> models are very different, so the tagging of positions isn't going to work,
> and Django 1.7 has changed substantially enough internally that porting
> South 1.x up to it would be a very large amount of work.

OK.

> Also, what are the applications in particular that this will be a problem
> for? I'm curious to know what Django + South things Debian is shipping
> these days.

Applications that depend on South and have different upstream versions
in Debian 7 and Debian 8 are:
http://tracker.debian.org/pkg/python-django-voting
http://tracker.debian.org/pkg/python-django-threadedcomments
http://tracker.debian.org/pkg/python-django-reversion
http://tracker.debian.org/pkg/python-django-picklefield
http://tracker.debian.org/pkg/bcfg2

Given the package names, it probably means only a single end-user application.
The others are Django "extensions" for use in non-packaged applications.

And looking more closely the case of bcfg2, the package in Debian 7 does
not use South, it started using South in the version in Jessie so it
should be easy to deal with.

For the 4 others, they should provide some NEWS.Debian entry warning
users of the potential upgrade problem.

(Bccing the 5 relevant bug reports to keep a record of this)

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer

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