Problem: every time collectstatic ran on the VM, Flatlogic's web UI
detected the modified files in staticfiles/ and auto-committed them
with a generic "Ver XX.YY" message (e.g. "Ver 30.04 Fix reports and
add Supervisor"), pushing the result to gitea but not GitHub. Every
push of CSS/JS changes triggered a reconciliation dance. See the
"Ver 30.04" divergence resolved by commit e0d2c74 for the most recent
example — that was the 3rd or 4th recurrence of this exact pattern.
Fix:
1. Add staticfiles/ to .gitignore
2. Untrack all 627 currently-tracked files via `git rm -r --cached`
3. Document the change in CLAUDE.md (Project Structure, Static Assets,
and a new "NOT tracked in git" subsection)
Deploy consequence: the NEXT pull on the VM will delete
staticfiles/ from the working tree (because git sees those files
removed from the tree). Gemini MUST run `collectstatic --noinput`
IMMEDIATELY after `git pull` to repopulate from source, then
restart the service. Brief window of 404s on static assets is
acceptable at this scale (seconds).
After this change: collectstatic output lives on the VM's filesystem
but outside git's view, so Flatlogic's UI has nothing to auto-commit.
The recurring divergence pattern is permanently eliminated.
No runtime code changes — all 28 tests still pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
