id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	component	version	severity	resolution	keywords	cc	stage	has_patch	needs_docs	needs_tests	needs_better_patch	easy	ui_ux
24964	Infinite migrations with empty help_text via ugettext_lazy	Andy Gimblett	Andriy Sokolovskiy	"I've come across something which seems to be a bug; I've asked about it on django-users and was encouraged to raise it here.

There's a fuller explanation and easily runnable example on github: https://github.com/gimbo/django-ugettext_lazy_migrations

In short, given the following model (note the empty `help_text` string),
{{{
from django.db import models
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _

class X(models.Model):
    y = models.CharField(help_text=_(''), max_length=10)
}}}
repeated calls of `manage.py makemigrations` will, after the initial migration, produce an infinite series of new migrations, each of which contains an `AlterField`, but which does nothing.  The expected behaviour would be to produce an initial migration and then no further migrations, of course.

The problems goes away if you do any of the following:

* Remove the `help_text` parameter
* Use a non-empty `help_text`
* Don't internationalise the `help_text` value
* Use `ugettext` instead of `ugettext_lazy` (which, I understand, you shouldn't)

I've reproduced it on all released 1.8.x Django versions up to 1.8.2, but it doesn't exhibit on any 1.7.x versions I've tried.

I haven't tried any development versions.

I mentioned it on django-users, and Carl Meyer suggested the following:

    I would guess the problem has to do with a careless `if help_text:` somewhere in the migration detection code. It would be worth checking whether the same problem exists with any other similar field parameters (e.g. `label`).

Thanks!"	Bug	closed	Migrations	1.8	Normal	wontfix	migrations, internationalisation	me@…	Accepted	0	0	0	0	0	0