rails 3.1 db:test:prepare and "pending migrations" problem

Recent switch to Rails 3.1.0.rc4, and I'm having trouble getting our CI builds to run. It boils down to the following simplified case:

-bash-3.2$ echo $RAILS_ENV
test
-bash-3.2$ bundle exec rake db:drop db:create db:test:prepare
You have 21 pending migrations:
  20100628174219 InitialSchema
  20100706175001 AddCompanyToClassifieds
  20100720132917 CartItemActionMigration
  20100811192506 AddJobTitleToDirect开发者_StackOverfloworyListings
  ...

If I replace that command with bundle exec rake db:drop db:create db:migrate db:test:prepare it works fine.

In digging deeper the core db:test:prepare task has db:abort_if_pending_migrations as a pre-requisite.

Now am I just missing something obvious, or is that completely pointless? Running db:test:prepare (in the standard case) calls db:schema:load which executes schema.rb -- whose entire point is to load the schema without running all migrations. By failing to run unless all migrations have been executing (thus forcing a db:migrate prior to db:test:prepare), does it not make itself utterly useless?

I guess I can add the extra db:migrate to my CI build process, but I'd like to know what I'm doing wrong.

I believe db:test:prepare is not intended to run in the TEST environment (otherwise you could just run db:schema:load yourself). Normally you would run db:test:prepare in the development environment. The check for pending migrations is then quite useful (you will know if your coworkers committed some new migrations before you run and fail a bunch of tests). Since running the tests runs db:test:prepare anyway, you should rarely need to run that by hand (certainly not for your CI builds). Omit the call to db:test:prepare.