Failure with makemigrations about django-swappable-models

[sheppard]

Thanks for the report. In general, Django still has limited support for swapping a model after the initial migration - see Django ticket #25313 and the warnings in the AUTH_USER_MODEL documentation. That said, it does seem to sort of work - but then there are edge cases such this one, where AUTH_USER_MODEL is hardcoded in django/db/migrations/state.py (as you've noted). It would be better to establish a registry of all installed swappable models, and remove all explicit references to AUTH_USER_MODEL from django.db.migrations. I haven't yet found a Django ticket for fixing this, but presumably that is the long-term plan.

So, the short answer is that more work needs to be done in Django core for this to work. In the meantime, the most robust solution is to tell your users to start from the beginning with the swappable setting in place, or to be willing to wipe out their migrations (and potentially entire database) once they've established that they want to swap a model. I'll update the Swapper documentation to note this limitation.

[nemesifier]

I think this can be closed.