Schema Evolution branch?

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David Anderson

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Dec 27, 2006, 10:59:53 PM12/27/06
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Hey all,

I've been hacking on my application for a bit now, and I'm at the
point where I'd want to be able to evolve my schema, rather than blow
away the data or futz around with SQL to upgrade stuff. So I took a
look at the schema-evolution branch, and it looks mostly abandoned.

Is this the case? Is the code there still desired in general for
Django? If so, and if nobody is actively working to get it running,
how can I help to get this branch back on its feet and polished?

- Dave

Steve Hutton

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Dec 28, 2006, 1:40:07 PM12/28/06
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On 2006-12-28, David Anderson

There have been some recent discussions about this on the users list.
The SOC branch is apparently not being maintained, but Victor Ng has
an alternative implmentation. He has asked for a new branch to be
opened so those who want to test and develop this new code base can
more easily collaborate.

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/django-users/browse_thread/thread/bd1417a08e37774a/67af32e775dae595

Steve

inflector

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Jan 8, 2007, 6:34:19 PM1/8/07
to Django developers
That whole discussion seems like it should have taken place here to me
but I'm a noob so perhaps I've missed the disctinction between users
and developers.

Any idea what the status is on the potential for a branch, or for
Victor's changes getting rolled into the schema evolution branch? I've
volunteered to put some work into this on the other discussion but am
not sure what the next steps are or who will make those decisions.

- Curtis

Russell Keith-Magee

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Jan 8, 2007, 7:31:09 PM1/8/07
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On 1/9/07, inflector <cur...@tradingblox.com> wrote:
>
> That whole discussion seems like it should have taken place here to me
> but I'm a noob so perhaps I've missed the disctinction between users
> and developers.

There is no formal distinction - users are the set of people
interested in using Django to develop websites, whereas developers are
those interested in contributing to improve Django itself. Anyone is
welcome to be a member of either group.

Inside the developers, there are the core developers (such as myself)
that have commit access to the repository, and branch developers that
have commit access to a particular branch of Django. There is a subset
of the core developers (Adrian and Jacob) that have administrator
access to the repository and can grant commit access to various parts
of the tree.

Branch developer status will generally be granted to anyone that has a
good idea, and can demonstrate that they will be able to deliver what
they promise (a prototype implementation is the usual minimum
benchmark). Core developer status is the next step, once a reputation
for consistent contribution to the community is established.

> Any idea what the status is on the potential for a branch, or for
> Victor's changes getting rolled into the schema evolution branch? I've
> volunteered to put some work into this on the other discussion but am
> not sure what the next steps are or who will make those decisions.

At the moment, the ball is in Victor's court - he has presented a
prototype implementation, so if he wants to champion this cause, he
needs to contact Jacob and request SVN access to the schema evolution
branch. At that point, he will be the integration person for that
branch, so if you want to contribute, he will be the person to
coordinate with. If Victor doesn't want the champion role, then the
floor is open for someone to step up, with some sample code to prove
that they are capable of completing the task.

Yours,
Russ Magee %-)

Victor Ng

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Jan 8, 2007, 8:52:32 PM1/8/07
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I've already emailed Jacob last week to open the branch for me.

As it turns out - I've got *lots* of spare programming cycles since
I'm stuck in an entirely unholy quagmire of bureaucratic sludge right
now. :)

Mmm..... bureaucratic sludge.....

vic


--
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by
stupidity." - Hanlon's Razor

Russell Keith-Magee

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Jan 8, 2007, 9:26:19 PM1/8/07
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On 1/9/07, Victor Ng <crank...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I've already emailed Jacob last week to open the branch for me.

Ok.

> As it turns out - I've got *lots* of spare programming cycles since
> I'm stuck in an entirely unholy quagmire of bureaucratic sludge right
> now. :)

Delicious :-).

In the meantime, I would suggest opening a ticket for the Schema
Evolution feature (like the #2333 ticket for the test framework) -
This provides a common place to keep patches, etc related to the
project until such time as a branch is made available. You don't
_have_ to have a branch to implement a big feature (as the test
framework demonstrates) - it's just helpful if a lot of people need to
coordinate their efforts.

Yours,
Russ Magee %-)

Jacob Kaplan-Moss

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Jan 9, 2007, 12:15:12 AM1/9/07
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On 1/8/07 7:52 PM, Victor Ng wrote:
> I've already emailed Jacob last week to open the branch for me.

Crap -- I must have missed that email. I'll get something set up first thing
tomorrow morning (my wife's telling me to close the damned laptop and go to
bed...); please feel free to poke me again if I forget!

Jacob

Victor Ng

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Jan 15, 2007, 3:24:07 PM1/15/07
to django-d...@googlegroups.com, Jacob Kaplan-Moss
Hey - any chance I'll get a schema evo-branch before 1.0?

vic

Michael Radziej

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Jan 16, 2007, 1:32:27 AM1/16/07
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Hi,

Victor Ng schrieb:


>
> Hey - any chance I'll get a schema evo-branch before 1.0?

What's the point in making Victor wait all the time? He has asked
multiple times for a branch, and nobody makes any decision :-(

Michael


Russell Keith-Magee

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Jan 16, 2007, 4:33:26 AM1/16/07
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You're attributing to malice that which can be adequately explained by
the fact that we are all very busy people. Read Jacob's last post. He
pretty much said he is happy to give Victor access - he just needs to
find the time to do it. I don't know Jacob's specific situation at the
moment, but if it's anything like mine, sometimes the little things
that aren't urgent or directly related to work get lost in the miasma.

This is unfortunate, and I offer the collective apologies of the core
developers for any incovenience this has caused - however, I would ask
you to keep in mind that:

1) While a branch would be exceedingly useful for collaboration
purposes, there is nothing stopping Victor from kickstarting the
process by working on schema evolution in his own stream, uploading
patches to a ticket whenever he has something to share (like I
suggested last time).

2) The core developers are ultimately volunteers on an open source
project. Personally, unless my paid job provides a specific
opportunity, my Django time is all my own. If something like this gets
forgotten or delayed, it isn't a personal attack - it's just the
unfortunate consequence of dealing whose deadlines sometimes get in
the way of the perfection :-)

If you have any constructive suggestions on how to resolve these sorts
of issues, feel free to raise them. However, I'm not sure there is
much that can be done, short of slowing the rotation of the earth to
give us all 36 hour days.

Yours,
Russ Magee %-)

Victor Ng

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Jan 16, 2007, 10:19:06 AM1/16/07
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On 1/16/07, Russell Keith-Magee <freakb...@gmail.com> wrote:
> You're attributing to malice that which can be adequately explained by
> the fact that we are all very busy people. Read Jacob's last post. He
> pretty much said he is happy to give Victor access - he just needs to
> find the time to do it. I don't know Jacob's specific situation at the
> moment, but if it's anything like mine, sometimes the little things
> that aren't urgent or directly related to work get lost in the miasma.

I'm sure everyone is just insanely busy. Someone once told me that
the reward for doing good work quickly is more work. :)

I'm going to restart a mirror of the Django repo on my own. I don't
think uploading a patch is the right way to go about having the code
integrated into the trunk since my code is working and stable, but
there are a couple quirks still to work out.

I'll try to have a repo setup for people to play with this week -
getting schema-evo stabilized isn't something that the core-devs
should have to be involved with anyway.

vic

Michael Radziej

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Jan 17, 2007, 12:19:19 AM1/17/07
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Russell Keith-Magee wrote:
>
> On 1/16/07, Michael Radziej <m...@noris.de> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Victor Ng schrieb:
>> >
>> > Hey - any chance I'll get a schema evo-branch before 1.0?
>>
>> What's the point in making Victor wait all the time? He has asked
>> multiple times for a branch, and nobody makes any decision :-(
>
> You're attributing to malice that which can be adequately explained by
> the fact that we are all very busy people. [...]

Oh my. My posting really wasn't meant to look that rude. All I wanted is
to raise a bit of attention since I'm feeling sad (sad! not annoyed!)
that that state holds up other volunteers and might make contributors go
away.

I wouldn't have thought that it could raise feelings like this. Please
accept my apologies. English isn't my first language, and the usual
communication culture in Germany is very direct without people feeling
bad about it. It obviously looks aggressive to you, but it really didn't
to me when I wrote it. I'll try to be more cautious.

Yours,

Michael

Russell Keith-Magee

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Jan 17, 2007, 1:18:26 AM1/17/07
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On 1/17/07, Michael Radziej <m...@noris.de> wrote:
>
> I wouldn't have thought that it could raise feelings like this. Please
> accept my apologies. English isn't my first language, and the usual
> communication culture in Germany is very direct without people feeling
> bad about it. It obviously looks aggressive to you, but it really didn't
> to me when I wrote it. I'll try to be more cautious.

No apologies necessary. I've spent some time in Germany, so I
understand the uniquely German approach to directness ;-)
Unfortunately, it has been my experience that this doesn't always
translate well - I just wanted to make it clear (particularly to those
that are new to the Django community) that the issue here is people
being busy, not people being ignored.

Yours,
Russ Magee %-)

Steve Hutton

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Jan 17, 2007, 2:18:14 AM1/17/07
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On 2007-01-17, Russell Keith-Magee <freakboy3742> wrote:
>
> No apologies necessary. I've spent some time in Germany, so I
> understand the uniquely German approach to directness ;-)
> Unfortunately, it has been my experience that this doesn't always
> translate well - I just wanted to make it clear (particularly to those
> that are new to the Django community) that the issue here is people
> being busy, not people being ignored.

It sounds like Jacob is the right one to create the branch. Maybe
the best thing is to contact him again directly to remind him? :-)
Here's what he wrote last week:

>>>Re: Schema Evolution branch?
>>>Jacob Kaplan-Moss
>>> Mon, 08 Jan 2007 21:15:19 -0800

>>> Crap -- I must have missed that email. I'll get something set up first
>>> thing tomorrow morning (my wife's telling me to close the damned laptop
>>> and go to bed...); please feel free to poke me again if I forget!

>>> Jacob

Steve

James Bennett

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Jan 17, 2007, 4:10:04 AM1/17/07
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On 1/17/07, Steve Hutton <gm...@featurecomplete.com> wrote:
> It sounds like Jacob is the right one to create the branch. Maybe
> the best thing is to contact him again directly to remind him? :-)

Or just look in Trac, maybe?

http://code.djangoproject.com/browser/django/branches/schema-evolution-ng

;)

--
"May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house."
-- George Carlin

Tim Keating

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Jan 17, 2007, 3:13:53 PM1/17/07
to Django developers
Has anyone broached the subject of switching to a distributed source
control system, such as Mercurial? In such an environment, central
branches aren't needed; everyone with a copy of the source repository
can branch it on their local system. Mercurial also has a very nice
patch generation system. And I'm led to believe there's a plugin for
using it with Trac.

(Edit: now that I do a quick search, I see that it has been mentioned a
couple of times, but not discussed in any kind of serious way.)

TK

Michael Radziej

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Jan 17, 2007, 5:13:06 PM1/17/07
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Hi,

Tim Keating schrieb:

Well, there's so many of them! If you want to push it, why not try your
favourite one and write a wiki article about it? Would be interesting to
read about the different approaches.


Cheers,

Michael

flo...@gmail.com

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Jan 17, 2007, 8:16:08 PM1/17/07
to Django developers
Michael Radziej wrote:
> > In such an environment, central
> > branches aren't needed; everyone with a copy of the source repository
> > can branch it on their local system.

Have you checked out SVK? ( http://svk.bestpractical.com/view/HomePage
) I haven't done much work with it, but it looks like it can mimic
most of the same functionality that you mentioned, using SVN for the
underlying filesystem. Using that, the Django project itself doesn't
have to switch away from SVN, but individual users can still open up
local branches.

Deryck Hodge

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Jan 18, 2007, 10:19:14 AM1/18/07
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I'd recommend Bazaar. It's written in Python, very rich in features,
and is not tied exclusively to SVN. Gary Wilson has a post about how
he manages Django work with it at
http://gdub.wordpress.com/2007/01/11/hacking-django-how-bazaar/ which
can server as a nice intro. And like SVK, there's no need for the
Django project to change SCMs.

Cheers,
deryck

Victor Ng

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Jan 21, 2007, 11:30:48 PM1/21/07
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Ugh... my stupid harddrive with developer Xen images keeled over on
Friday and I'm trying to get everything back into a normal working
state.

I ought to be able to start committing code in the next day or two.
argh... i hate hard disks.

vic

Jeremy Dunck

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Jan 22, 2007, 10:07:41 AM1/22/07
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On 1/21/07, Victor Ng <crank...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I ought to be able to start committing code in the next day or two.
> argh... i hate hard disks.

I kinda like 'em. I remember booting off floppies. Not much fun. :)

Massimiliano Ravelli

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Mar 1, 2007, 7:52:52 AM3/1/07
to Django developers
On 16 Gen, 16:19, "Victor Ng" <crankyco...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'll try to have a repo setup for people to play with this week -
> getting schema-evo stabilized isn't something that the core-devs
> should have to be involved with anyway.

This feature is very interesting and I may help with some testing.
Is there some documentation or code available ?

Massimiliano

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