That page was a great start, that's where I started to figure most of it
out when I started down this path a while back.  And what I described is
a fully working app, but I've not exposed it because I'm not so sure
that it really fits into the spirit of Django, even on the contrib side.
:)  That having been said, it's something we very much needed for our
current app, and the current branch in the Django trunk for doing
history just doesn't have the performance for large DBs, especially with
large change counts (one table in columnar key/value fashion just won't
cut it, especially for reporting purposes).  We had to have row-based to
do reporting on millions of historical entries at any speed.  (And it's
also much faster for re-constructing history at the DB level, we can
recreate any table at any point in time with a roll-forward type
approach from the audit tables, columnar requires a lot more processing
to do the same).

As far as how well it works, it's great across the board. :)  We have
the syncdb signal stuff working fine (all the missing tables are created
happily, and I don't have to write any custom SQL, I just piggyback on
the things in django/core/management which do a fine job, since a Model
is a Model, dynamic or not), and it's actually really solid under load,
and easy to add into an existing model to "turn on" auditing.  Here's an
example of how you use it:

class SomeModel(models.Model):
   c1 = models.CharField(maxlength=10)
   c2 = models.ForeignKey(SomeOtherModel)

   class Audit:
     pass

That's it.  I think it's nifty. :)  Calling save() or delete() on the
model automagically writes the audit entries and all the related tasks,
all you have to do is add the Audit app to the INSTALLED_APPS, and all
the rest is handled, and it doesn't require any hackery to the Django
codebase, which makes it near perfect for my uses. :)

So, the problem itself is actually solved for the runtime portion of the
app.  The *only* thing that I found myself missing is the ability to
generate the correct DROP TABLE/CREATE TABLE/CREATE INDEX type SQL in a
printable manner that the Django manage.py commands could hook into and
either display or run.  When I reset an app, I want to reset all my
audit tables in that app as well, and there's just no signals in place
(and no way to inject SQL code for display even if the signals were
there, like in syncdb).  Same for "manage.py sql", "manage.py sqlclear",
and etc.  So, that's at least part of where this all came from, and all
the more reason that I like the --sql flag and reducing the manage.py
set of SQL-related options to something more straightforward.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
George