Re: Is upgrading to a newer Django version generally hassle-free?

[Carlos Daniel Ruvalcaba Valenzuela]

On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 1:14 PM, sadpluto <ma...@sadpluto.com> wrote:
> I have is whether transitioning to newer versions of Django
> is generally easy and well documented. I can only imagine that it is, but I
> haven't found convincing evidence while searching online. It would be great
> to see what's the consensus of experienced developers.

Generally it is, I still have stuff I did on the pre 1.0 versions and
still works with some minor adjustments on the newest 1.4 version.
While it usually is ok to upgrade django versions the best practice is
to test before deploying to production, some times what brokes is 3th
party apps so is better to have an environment similar to production
for testing before final deployment when upgrading versions.

[sadpluto]

Thanks for your comment, Carlos. I guess focusing too much on a future-proof setup is probably pointless.

[Daniel Roseman]

Django makes a fairly strong commitment to backwards compatibility across versions, which is documented here:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/misc/api-stability/
They guarantee that any documented api will only be deprecated with two versions warning: for example, the old function-based generic views were marked as pending deprecated in 1.3, fully deprecated in 1.4, and will be removed completely in the future 1.5 release. So upgrading is usually pretty safe.
--
DR.

[kenneth gonsalves]

also django is one of the few projects where one can happily run
production sites on trunk, upgrading every tuesday.
--
regards
Kenneth Gonsalves

[sadpluto]

Thanks to all for the feedback. It looks safe enough. I guess I was hoping for a 2to3-like tool for these properly announced upgrades!