DATABASES ENGINE settings undocumented breaking change from 1.3 to 1.4 (full class path)

[ddjango@…]

Up through Django 1.3, the following shortcut worked in DATABASES settings:

DATABASES = {

'default' : {

'ENGINE': 'sqlite3',
'NAME': 'my.db',
'USER': ,
'PASSWORD': ,
'HOST': ,
'PORT': ,

},

}

As of DJango 1.4 (tested on 1.4.8), starting the app results in:

django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: 'sqlite3' isn't an available database backend.
Try using django.db.backends.sqlite3 instead.

Changing ENGINE to 'django.db.backends.sqlite3' does indeed fix the problem.

However this is not listed anywhere in the 1.4 release notes:
​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/releases/1.4/#backwards-incompatible-changes-in-1-4

P.S. Our project started in Django 0.9 and has been carried forward one version at a time. Presumably at some point this was the suggested way of doing this, and it's worked up until 1.4. The change is fine, and the error message is helpful, but the release notes need to include this.

[Anssi Kääriäinen]

This was mentioned in deprecation timeline (​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/internals/deprecation/). Unfortunately it isn't always easy to follow all the changes for single release, as backwards incompatible changes contain some of interesting points, deprecation timeline others.

I am going to mark this as wontfix. This is how our deprecation documentation worked for 1.4 release (there might be improvements in later releases), and changing that now for 1.4 isn't going to happen.