[gardarh]

I don't agree with that. I'd say don't worry about south if you're just starting out playing with django and willing to manually delete tables every now and then to get make sure your db matches your models.

As soon as you are doing something that anyone relies on and to save you endless effort you should use South, IMO. Even if it's a one-person project (I have a few of those) South saves you both a lot of time and aggravation.

[frankwiles]

Absolutely agree. Even something as simple as adding an optional field is just ./manage.py schemamigration --auto <appname> and you're done vs "ALTER TABLE blah blah blah...." on your local system, dev/staging, and then again on production in the right order, every time, manually. Can't imagine anyone wanting to go back to manual after using South.

[rmrfrmrf]

This thread perfectly exemplifies the frustration laid out in my original post.

[jaegerpicker]

Welcome to development with open source technology. It takes time and effort to figure out the best practices. There is no magic bullet, sorry. That's not meant to be snarky it's just the way the process works.

[collyw]

And use Postgres as the database. If you use MySQL you will get sick of South telling you to use Postgres whenever a migration doesn´t go smoothly.