Changing model field choices results in spurious migrations

[John-Scott Atlakson]

Consider a simple model:

from django.db import models

CHOICES = (
    ('1', '1'),
)

class BasicModel(models.Model):
    choices = models.CharField(choices=CHOICES, max_length=100)

If CHOICES is changed e.g. CHOICES += (('2', '2'),), then makemigrations insists on creating a new migration for this change. However, the migration appears to mostly be a no-op. sqlmigrate on PostgreSQL shows:

BEGIN;
ALTER TABLE "core_basicmodel" ALTER COLUMN "choices" DROP DEFAULT;

COMMIT;

Which is slightly strange since the initial migration never set a DEFAULT, so there is nothing to DROP.

I first noticed this working with django-cms (see ​https://github.com/divio/django-cms/issues/3479). In some cases when I attempt to make a migration for an unrelated app, makemigrations will forcefully create a migration for the cms app because the settings.CMS_TEMPLATES choices have changed. It then makes this automatically created migration (which is output in the virtualenv e.g. env/src/django-cms/cms/migrations_django) a dependency for the migration I actually intended to create. There doesn't appear to be a way to avoid this. This means I now have a migration I actually need for one of my apps that is completely dependent on me creating a migration for a third party app, which I don't directly control, resulting in migrations that are broken for other developers.

This can also happen when the choices differ in development vs deployment, Django will complain:

  Your models have changes that are not yet reflected in a migration, and so won't be applied.
  Run 'manage.py makemigrations' to make new migrations, and then re-run 'manage.py migrate' to apply them.

I am not familiar with the migration internals, but since 'choices' isn't used (at least not on PostgreSQL) to make any actual alterations to the database shouldn't it ignore this attribute?