So somehow Django stopped being able to support .pyc files as migrations between our last builds with 1.11.lower and the current builds with 1.11.higher. Frozen environments use these to distribute just the .pyc (no source)... but somehow this got reverted because. But how did it get reverted in Django 1.11 (LTS) branch? Apparently it will be restored in 2.1, but we're still deploying on python 2.7, so that's out of reach as of yet. Argh.