Django has a long and varied history of dealing with changing schema requirements - from the early projects like django-evolution and the two aborted attempts to provide migrations in Django itself, through to projects like South and now looking ahead to a more integrated solution with Django itself once more.

This talk will cover some of that history - helpful to get some kind of context when it comes to current developments - as well as exploring some of the common problems a migration system (and its users) encounter, and how those lessons and ideas are being used to help improve Django itself to better support schema migrations.