Christian Kaula. Let the computer do it.

Okay so after taking a few hours to find out how to get a unique SlugField into the database per South here's what I found out:

Adding the unique index is the last thing South does in a forward migration. That means all you need is a few lines of code after the call to add_field that take care of the empty entries getting unique data that would otherwise violate the unique constraint.

import string
from random import choice

def do_stuff():
  chars = string.letters + string.digits
  newpasswd = ''
  for i in range(50):
    newpasswd = newpasswd + choice(chars)
  return newpasswd


class Migration:

  def forwards(self):
    # Adding field 'Category.slug'
    db.add_column('forum_category', 'slug', models.SlugField(default='sdf', unique=True), keep_default=False)
    for c in Category.objects.all():
      c.slug = do_stuff()
      c.save()

South is really neat - once you figured out how it works.