Support for symlinking to whole app directories for staticfiles

[Mitar]

It would be useful to support also symlinking whole (top) app static directories and not just every and each file, with collectstatic manage command. In this way it would not be necessary to rerun the manage command every time you add some files to the app.

[Aymeric Augustin]

I'm having a hard time understanding how this could work.

Let's say I have two apps, foo and bar, and the following directory structure:

bar/
    models.py
    static/
        css/
            bar.css
        js/
            foobar.js
    views.py
foo/
    models.py
    static/
        css/
            foo.css
        js/
            foobar.js
    views.py
manage.py
settings.py
urls.py

The expected result of collectstatic is:

static/
    css/
        bar.css
        foo.css
    js/
        foobar.js # from foo or bar, depending on the order in INSTALLED_APPS

How do you achieve this result with symlinks to directories only?

[Mitar]

Hm, you are right. ;-)