Migration strategy broken?

[marxide]

Following these instructions did not work for me:

https://github.com/askap-vast/vast-pipeline/blob/master/DEVELOPING.md#1-you-modify-modelspy

I modified the models and deleted the 0001_initial migration file. Running makemigrations then fails because the 0002_q3c migration explicitly depends on 0001_initial which now no longer exists.

Does this work for anyone else?

[ajstewart]

In short, no. Those instructions should say to temporary remove/rename 0002_q3c to avoid this error. At least that's what I do when running makemigrations.

[srggrs]

Sorry, you guys are right. I think those were written when we still set up Q3C manually. I need to finish up those instructions.

The general rule of thumbs is: if you don't have a production site constantly used by users, you can safely remove all the migrations files, then run makemigrations and then get back 0002_q3c file by discarding the changing (deletion) of that file with git checkout path/to/file. If you have a production set up then you don't remove the existing migration files, and use makemigrations to make new files.

[marxide]

Now that we do have something deployed, should we change the instructions to simply running makemigrations? We can always squash them later.