Inconsistent makemigrations results

[xi]

When running manage.py makemigrations on different setups, I get different results.

[xi]

In django/db/migrations/autodetector.py line 912 (in generate_altered_fields() directly after if old_field_dec != new_field_dec:) I added the following code for debugging:

print(app_label, model_name, field_name)
print(old_field_dec)
print(new_field_dec)
print()

Then I ran ./manage.py makemigrations --dry-run with different setups. This is what I found so far:

• I did not find differences between py35 and py36.
• In both py2 and py3 default=None is removed from devices.models.Device.used_in
• There are some changes connected to unicode, even in #223. For example the choices for users.models.Lageruser.timezone are from pytz.common_timezones. Depending on the python version these are either unicode or byte strings.
• Sometimes choices are derived from dictionaries. As the ordering of dictionaries is not guaranteed in python, there can be unintended changes.

[xi]

We can still have this issue because some model choices depend on settings (e.g. Lageruser.theme) or external libraries (e.g. Lageruser.timezone). I am not sure what to do about that. There was some talk in django about that a while ago (see https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/22837) but nothing came of it.

I see some options:

1. live with it
2. ignore choices in migrations as they have no real impact on the database (e.g. with django-migrations-ignore-attrs (does not look like a mature project on first glance))
3. Move the choices to the form (I tried this and failed)