We are using Odoo v8 and we'd like to improve the deployment of our in-house modules into production.

What are the good practices when upgrading custom modules ? At the moment we copy the latest version of the module into the addons folder, and trigger the update of the said module from the web interface (I do restart the server whenever it's required).

I forsee problems when I'm going to update existing (stored) fields in some of my models. I understand the Odoo ORM is going to create new storable fields but it doesn't have any clue if the new field comes from a renamed field or if it's a legit new field, so in the end we have to update our tables and move the values of the old field columns to the new field columns.

At the moment we tend to avoid modifying existing fields of our modules, as renaming those would make them appear empty on the user side (thank god Odoo doesn't drop non used columns).

With Hibernate (Java) it's possible to use different ddl strategies so the update of the schema is either the ORM's responsibility or the DBA's. Hibernate recommends the latter, because the update is more predictable. Is there a similar mechanism with Odoo ?