Skip upgrade from 18.3.5 to 18.5.1 does not create the work_item_descriptions tables

Hi,

We've used the GitLab Operator to perform an upgrade of our self-hosted GitLab from 18.3.5 to 18.5.1.

After the upgrade, attempting to create an issue would yield a 500 error complaining about a missing work_item_descriptions table.

After investigating, we found out that:

• the table was introduced for version 18.5 with migration 20250912072500_create_work_item_descriptions
• all migrations were successfully run during the upgrade (checked with gitlab-rake db:migrate:status)
• the table and its partitions were indeed missing from our database (checked with gitlab-rake gitlab:db:schema_checker:run)

Checking the logs of our migration task, the migration was indeed reported as run and the tables created.

Digging a bit more, we've noticed that a post-migration 20250909133636_drop_work_item_descriptions_table, introduced in 18.4, removes the table.

So, upgrading from 18.3 to 18.5 directly will run migration 20250912072500_create_work_item_descriptions to create the table (with the new partition key), then runs 20250909133636_drop_work_item_descriptions_table which drops the table.

I am not sure of the guarantees in terms of skip upgrades. Considering that 18.5 is an advertised version stop, I would expect others to run into a similar issue when skipping over the 18.4 upgrade.

Thanks for maintaining GitLab!