#24558: django-admin.py dumpdata should be deterministic for VCS and diff
friendliness
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Reporter: gfairchild | Owner: nobody
Type: New feature | Status: new
Component: Core (Management commands) | Version: 1.7
Severity: Normal | Keywords:
Triage Stage: Unreviewed | Has patch: 0
Easy pickings: 0 | UI/UX: 0
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I have several projects in which I like to store fixtures that are shared
between project instances (e.g., development and production instances).
Since fixtures are just text files, they're easily stored in version
control; I use git for all my projects.
The problem I'm experiencing is that the `dumpdata` management command
outputs data differently every time it runs (I'm on Django 1.7.7, so it
may be different on other versions of Django). I understand why it does
this - a lot of the data are stored in dicts or sets, and dicts and sets
don't provide any promises on ordering. The reason this is a problem is
because, for large fixtures, this can cause significant changes to be
perceived by the VCS. Git is pretty smart, but if a 10mb fixture is
completely reordered, it can't actually show me what's changed when I do a
diff. Additionally, if I re-dump all the data in my database, even if the
data haven't changed, git will detect that the files are different because
all the data are in a different order.
The feature I'd like is for the `dumpdata` command to be deterministic;
that is, every time it runs, it should produce the same output for the
same input. This could even be an option that's turned off by default.
This will reduce VCS thrashing and improve the ability for us to diff
fixtures in order to understand what's actually changed.
I imagine this could fairly easily be solved by tossing a few `sorted`
statements in the right places, but I'm not sure.
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Ticket URL: <https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/24558>
Django <https://code.djangoproject.com/>
The Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines.
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