My understanding is this: This table keeps track of what migrations have been applied. Because migrations are only used for updating and we always directly apply changes to new install, we want to make sure that migrations are not applied again when the board is updated the next time. To do so, we insert all migrations that lead to the state of the new install. If this is the case, then installer should just read all migrations and insert them into the database. Having to manually add an insert statement here is error prone.