Simon Willison’s Weblog

Why isn’t the schema and data migration tool South included in Django by default?

7th January 2011

My answer to Why isn’t the schema and data migration tool South included in Django by default? on Quora

Because shipping things as part of Django means they can’t have separate releases, which means you only get a new released version every 6-12 months. South is improving far faster than that.

Guido van Rossum once described packages that are included in the Python standard library as having “one foot in the grave”—the API is frozen, and improvements are hard to ship. http://tarekziade.wordpress.com/...

Update 22nd March 2013: South is now scheduled to be merged in to Django core, there’s even a Kickstarter to help fund the development work: http://www.kickstarter.com/proje...