Hi folks, I’ve been working on ticket #56 "Primary key columns should be UNSIGNED" (really old) for a while now. It’s cumbersome and hard to fix for some reasons, including backwards compatibility, nothing that a single PR can solve but I’ll try to summarize where things are at this moment. Hopefully we can get to a consensus so I can continue.
The problem: Django has been storing primary keys as signed integers since the beginning and this is considered a waste of resources. Very few people seem to use negative values as primary keys, apparently. The desired solution: We want to change that in a backwards-compatible way to not cause migrations to happen in all projects using Django, in all of a sudden. This is where things start to get difficult. These are the links for the related ticket and PR up to this point: https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/56 (Primary key columns should be UNSIGNED) https://github.com/django/django/pull/11900 (PR) — While I was working on PR 11900, I stumbled across this other PR 8924 "BigAutoField as new default in 2.0”, and a particular comment from Nick Pope got my attention: https://github.com/django/django/pull/8924#issuecomment-516792989 The idea o adding a new DEFAULT_AUTOFIELD setting made a lot of sense to me, as we would be able to keep things backwards compatible. My first reaction after following that discussion, was to add a missing part that would likely help, which was the PositiveBigIntegerField. This is already fixed and merged: https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/30987 — Now that we have PositiveBigIntegerField merged in, we can also have PositiveBigAutoField and finally move forward with ticket #56. But we’d still need the ability to set a different default Auto Field. To achieve this, I’ve created a new ticket and Mariusz Felisiak suggested to bring this discussion to the developers list, whether or not we should move forward with this approach: https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/31007 I want to hear from you folks, whether or not we can get to a consensus on adding this new setting but also, hear any concerns or issues you can anticipate. Ideally, this new setting would default to AutoField until Django 4? After that we can make it default to PositiveBigAutoField. We could (or should) also change the project template to set DEFAULT_AUTOFIELD to PositiveBigAutoField for new projecst, as suggested in Nick Pope's comment above. Thank you -- Caio -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers (Contributions to Django itself)" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/django-developers/8E947B86-2228-4DD3-9D6A-C1B6D757652E%40gmail.com.
