Welcome to Django 1.2.4!
This is the fourth “bugfix” release in the Django 1.2 series, improving the stability and performance of the Django 1.2 codebase.
Django 1.2.4 maintains backwards compatibility with Django 1.2.3, but contain a number of fixes and other improvements. Django 1.2.4 is a recommended upgrade for any development or deployment currently using or targeting Django 1.2.
For full details on the new features, backwards incompatibilities, and deprecated features in the 1.2 branch, see the Django 1.2 release notes.
Ordinarily, a point release would not include new features, but in the case of Django 1.2.4, we have made an exception to this rule.
One of the bugs fixed in Django 1.2.4 involves a set of circumstances whereby a running a test suite on a multiple database configuration could cause the original source database (i.e., the actual production database) to be dropped, causing catastrophic loss of data. In order to provide a fix for this problem, it was necessary to introduce a new setting – TEST_DEPENDENCIES – that allows you to define any creation order dependencies in your database configuration.
Most users – even users with multiple-database configurations – need not be concerned about the data loss bug, or the manual configuration of TEST_DEPENDENCIES. See the original problem report documentation on controlling the creation order of test databases for details.
The function-based TEST_RUNNER previously used to execute the GeoDjango test suite, django.contrib.gis.tests.run_gis_tests(), was finally deprecated in favor of a class-based test runner, django.contrib.gis.tests.GeoDjangoTestSuiteRunner, added in this release.
In addition, the GeoDjango test suite is now included when running the Django test suite with runtests.py and using spatial database backends.
Dec 26, 2011