Upgrading Django 1.5 to 1.8 the wild way. Good idea or a pretty silly one?

Question

I have legacy django 1.5 app. The task is to upgrade it to 1.8 to enjoy all the goodness of a new version and easily proceed with further development.

Since it seems to be pretty difficult to just upgrade and do all the migration hell. I've tried the simplest thing: Install fresh Django 1.8 and put models, views and all the stuff in it and connect it to a copy of the legacy db. And run it. And it just worked (I didn't expect so, I just wanted to see the awful traceback and proceed with the hard way).

Now, the question is: Is it a good idea to do it like this or will it bite me after a while when not expected? Where are the gotchas? Or is it meant to work like this?

DB is sqlite3, South used in the development, migrations dir not copied in the new 1.8 install, Python is 2.7.5, DB connected without any modification.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This seems to be OK, no problems yet.

python manage.py makemigrations
python manage.py migrate --fake-initial

then i've started with the app modifications and everything just works.