Revision IDs as sequential numbers or dates

[henadzit]

Hi!

Thank you for the awesome project!

I'm wondering why alembic uses hex numbers as revision IDs. For instance, Django uses sequential numbers and Ruby on Rails uses date and time as part of a migration file name which makes it easy to understand the sequence of migrations without running alembic history just by looking at the folder. Thanks!

I wasn't able to find any previous discussion on this topic, please feel free to refer me to it.

[zzzeek]

because you then can't easily amend the order of operations or create branches. alembic's predecessor sqlalchemy-migrate used sequential numbers, and then in openstack migrations had to be numbered 1, 50, 100, 150, etc. because they had to add new migrations in between so often.

alembic assigns no meaning to its revision identifiers (just like a source control system) and they can be linked in any way using "down revision", "depends on", just like a source control system.