Kindly consider restoring enum support

[janwittkamp]

While upgrading to the latest minor release, our test suite started failing because several of our migrations define ENUM columns. We traced this to commit b068c3301472, which removed support for the enum column type (workaround in #895 not feasible).

We’ve read issue #895 and tried the suggested workaround, but in our codebase it either doesn’t work reliably or would require a non-trivial amount of changes to existing migrations—which feels like a lot for a minor upgrade. As a result, we’re temporarily pinning to 4.6.6.

A public GitHub search already shows hundreds of files using ->addColumn('…', 'enum', …).
Search query:

/->\s*addColumn\(\s*['"][^'"]+['"]\s*,\s*['"]enum['"]\s*,\s*(?:\[|array\()\s*/ lang:PHP

Many of these are in the Phinx ecosystem (which Migrations is built on).

Expectations around compatibility. Since Migrations sits on top of Phinx, many of us assumed enum would continue to behave as before. Seeing it disappear was a bit surprising during a minor upgrade.

Modeling existing schemas. MySQL/MariaDB (and PostgreSQL via CREATE TYPE … AS ENUM) support enums natively. Some teams—including us—use them intentionally to express constrained domains. Losing the type means larger refactors or workarounds for existing databases.

Is there a planned workaround or recommended path for projects currently relying on enum (e.g., a configuration toggle, adapter setting, or documented interim approach)?

[markstory]

We’ve read issue #895 and tried the suggested workaround, but in our codebase it either doesn’t work reliably or would require a non-trivial amount of changes to existing migrations—which feels like a lot for a minor upgrade. As a result, we’re temporarily pinning to 4.6.6.

Pinning to 4.6.6 is the best solution for now.

Cakephp has never had support for enum columns, and support for enum columns is unlikely to be added. As part of aligning migrations with cakephp enum support was dropped. I didn't anticipate that enums would be widely used because of the lack of support in cakephp.

A potential solution could be to continue providing enum support for MySQL within migrations as a compatibility shim. I don't know if there would be full compatibility for snapshot generation, but column operations would be covered.

[dereuromark]

An alternative would be to provide a script to make them varchar and provide a way to have bc this way.
With suggestion of using php enums.