[Owncloud] Corrupted views after upgrades (css problems)

[Christian Reiner]

Hello all, 
when upgrading OC I ran into an issue with corrupted styles a few times. 

Since I had that problem more than once and others reported the same issue I 
would like to point out a workaround to solve that issue. 
I am talking about corrupted views inside the web interface after login. Bug 
1640 shows a screenshot: 
http://bugs.owncloud.org/thebuggenie/owncloud/issues/oc-1640

In my cases it was cached css files that were outdated. Server side cached 
files, so no deep reload in the browser helped. I did not work through the 
strategy how OC caches the styles. But apparently the files are combined after 
being processed, most likely for speed improvements. Apparently these cached 
style definitions are outdated after some upgrades. and they won't get rebuilt 
automatically. 
For me this workaround fixed the issue: I simply made a trivial modification 
to one of the core css files (whitespace only) using a plain text editor on 
the server side. This is aparently enough for OC to recreate the cached 
versions (which makes sense in a way). 

I would like to make two suggestions, maybe someone familiar with the style 
caching wants to give this a short look: 
1.) always explicitly recreate all cached styles in case of an upgrade. 
2.) check the cached style timestamp (mtimes?) on a regular base against the 
timestamps of the processed files. Safest would be to do this during login, 
but obviously this slows down the login process which is bad. 

Just my suggestion, since I myself am not familliar with OCs caching strategy. 

-- 
Christian Reiner (arkascha)
[ foss at christian-reiner.info ]