Future of the COMPRESS_STORAGE setting in Django 4.2+

[browniebroke]

Slightly related to #1187, but longer term idea.

Django recently deprecated the STATICFILES_STORAGE and DEFAULT_FILE_STORAGE setting. In Cookiecutter Django, under some configuration, we do COMPRESS_STORAGE = STATICFILES_STORAGE. With the new setting, this would be COMPRESS_STORAGE = STORAGES["staticfiles"]["BACKEND"], which doesn't read as well.

So here is my question: should django-compressor consider adding or migrating the COMPRESS_STORAGE setting to something like COMPRESS_STORAGE_ALIAS, which would refer to a key from the STORAGES dict?

Obviously, this would only work for Django 4.2+, so it might make sense to wait before the old settings are completely gone from the versions supported by django-compressor, as I imagine reading from 2 possible settings * 2 values (default + user) might make the config code complicated.

[carltongibson]

HI @browniebroke — thanks for this. Let's perhaps do this on #1187, which can be the tracking issue.

I agree adding a COMPRESS_STORAGE_ALIAS is the way to go.

My current half-idea would be to populate that with the COMPRESS_STORAGE if not explicit set when the AppRegistry is loaded. Then have compressor just use that.

Following Django's guidance, from the release of Django 5.0 onwards, I'd suggest dropping support for Django <4.2 if there's going to be any complications here.