[qeternity]

> migrations engine is pretty poor

I find this to be an odd take. The Django migrations engine is probably its strongest feature.

[ac130kz]

Any change you make has to be atomic, or it is unable to detect the change, and you have to rely on manual migrations.

[WD-42]

What do you mean by this? Auto migrations detect changes in your models. I'm not sure what atomic means in this context.

[ac130kz]

Let's say you change some attribute and the name of a model, Django simply does not recognize it, nuking the whole attribute

[wiredfool]

There is at least one way that migrating a + b is different than migrate a + migrate b, in ways that you can then only incrementally migrate your project rather than building from scratch.

It’s mainly in post migrate actions, and specifically for me adding a group for permissions.

[WD-42]

If you write manual migrations, then it's often worth it to write the reverse function (in your case, deleting that group) so that you avoid this situation.

[wiredfool]

It’s not the back and forth, it’s that a migration in b that requires the post migrate step from a will fail if both migrations are run in one shot, (say, because you’re bootstrapping a new dev or test db) but it will work when done incrementally (such as during development or deployment).