The upgrade process of south was pretty shitty.

The documentation was telling something like: Ensure you applied all previous migrations and then start from scratch. Thats not an upgrade path. It may work for standalone web applications, but I have a python project (packaged as deb/rpm package and using the packaged django version of different distributions) that should work with multiple django versions and the user may upgrade the django version at any point.

I had to write raw sql statements to get the mirgration status of south (after the upgrade, without a working version of south anymore) and "fake" apply the migrations of the new native solution.

If you were supporting applications which needed to work with or without South at the time of the transition, the best thing to do was probably ship two separate sets of migrations (one set written for South, one written for Django's built-in migration framework).

Yes, that's what I am doing. The problem is, how to preserve the state of the migrations when the user updates the django version.