# Declaring migration bankruptcy

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/declaring-migration-bankruptcy/185843>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [March 27, 2010, 1:04am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/declaring-migration-bankruptcy/185843 "2010-03-27T01:04:49Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![drewB](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/58f4c7/32.png) [@drewB](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/drewB)\
**Post date:** [March 27, 2010, 1:04am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/declaring-migration-bankruptcy/185843/1 "2010-03-27T01:04:49Z")

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I joined a project recently that has 2 years worth of migrations. It  
is about to go into production and I am wondering if we should  
consider clearing out most of the history. A poor decision made early  
on has caused the project to have about 20 custom plugins (all of  
which really belong in the application). One task involved in moving  
the code out of plugins involves all the migrations. The way the  
plugins are set up, there is a migration in the root application which  
calls the plugins migration. So there are two files for every plugin  
migration. We could certainly take the time to merge them all but I  
wonder if it is worthwhile. There is no way we are going to migrate  
back several months at this point (let alone years) so I question the  
value of old migrations.

So, my question is what is the downside of deleting old migrations  
(let’s define “old” as more than 3 months old on an active project)?