Naming conventions for Rails migrations

I agree with the previous poster. The naming should focus on readability. But also keep in mind that you can't (nor should) have two migrations with the same name.

So, general names like edit_foo_model is generally not a good idea (since, what happens when you want to add more columns to that model), then it would be better to group the columns into what the purpose is, like update_foo_for_bar_support. You can usually skip adding model since, well, everyone knows that migrations do handle models, so there is no need to mention that in the name (that is, update_foo instead of update_foo_model).

Also, what I usually do is to keep different changes separated. So, if there are multiple different changes in a model, I'd separate them into different migration files, one for adding columns and one for removing columns for instance.

I would split up multiple schema changes into multiple migrations so that you can easily name the single migrations!