Zulip's previous model for managing static asset files via Django
pipeline had some broken behavior around upgrades. In particular, it
was for some reason storing the information as to which static files
should be used in a memcached cache that was shared between different
deployments of Zulip. This means that during the upgrade process,
some clients might be served a version of the static assets that does
not correspond to the server they were connected to.
We've replaced that model with using ManifestStaticFilesStorage, which
instead allows each Zulip deployment directory to have its own
complete copy of the mapping of files to static assets, as it should
be.
We have to do a little bit of hackery with the staticfiles.json path
to make this work, basically because Django expects staticfiles.json
to be under STATIC_ROOT (aka the path nginx is serving to users), but
doing that doesn't really make sense for Zulip, since that directory
is shared between different deployments.
The purpose of this is to move a lot of the log and other generated
files used by the Zulip development environment into a consistent
hierarchy.
We also need to create this in tools/build-release-tarball as well,
since that runs a development environment out of a temporary
directory.
We need to update provision.py to compile the messages files, since
they are needed for the new i18n tests. And of course we need to
include the .mo files in release tarballs; there's a bit of complexity
there around how the tarball archives are created.
Reid Barton
Tim Abbott
Anders Kaseorg
Taranjeet Singh
Tim Abbott
Umair Khan
Vladislav Manchev
Tim Abbott