Rails has some support for multiple databases but it can be hard to
handle migrations with those. The easiest way to implement multiple
databases is to contain migrations into their own folder ("db/migrate"
for the primary db and "db/seconddb_migrate" for the second db). Without
this you would need to write code that allowed you to switch connections
in migrations. I can tell you from experience that is not a fun way to
implement multiple databases.
This refactoring is a pre-requisite for implementing other features
related to parallel testing and improved handling for multiple
databases.
The refactoring here moves the class methods from the `Migrator` class
into it's own new class `MigrationContext`. The goal was to move the
`migrations_paths` method off of the `Migrator` class and onto the
connection. This allows users to do the following in their
`database.yml`:
```
development:
adapter: mysql2
username: root
password:
development_seconddb:
adapter: mysql2
username: root
password:
migrations_paths: "db/second_db_migrate"
```
Migrations for the `seconddb` can now be store in the
`db/second_db_migrate` directory. Migrations for the primary database
are stored in `db/migrate`".
The refactoring here drastically reduces the internal API for migrations
since we don't need to pass `migrations_paths` around to every single
method. Additionally this change does not require any Rails applications
to make changes unless they want to use the new public API. All of the
class methods from the `Migrator` class were `nodoc`'d except for the
`migrations_paths` and `migrations_path` getter/setters respectively.
