The current Drupal update framework (roughly: hook_update_N) is quite old. It is still firmly rooted in the procedural origins of Drupal. Also, it has several shortcomings. Some of those shortcomings were addressed in the new(ish) hook_post_update mechanism, but that does not replace the old system, it only augments it for update code that needs the full Drupal framework to be available.

This blogpost is a repost of an issue I created in the Drupal Ideas issue queue. The proposal is inspired by Laravel migrations. These work by defining a class in a pre-determined location and...