I have two models: people and groups with many2many relationship. Since the relation has properties like level and membership_date, I used intermediate model membership with many2one relationship to both people and groups.

I wanted to have a related field group_ids in people (and vice-versa) but it is not possible due to this bug. So, I created group_ids as many2many field and used the membership table as the intermediate table and it works fine. I checked the orm classes to find if there are side effects and found that when attribute manual is true, the orm does try to create the intermediate table but that attribute is not used in any official addons!

Should manual=True be used when custom many2many table is used?