[Fixes #14394] remove support of GoogleCloudStorage

[mattiagiupponi]

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[gemini-code-assist]

Code Review

This pull request removes Google Cloud Storage support from the codebase. Specifically, it deletes the Google Storage Manager implementation, removes its corresponding unit tests in geonode/storage/tests.py, and removes the google-cloud-storage dependency from pyproject.toml. I have no feedback to provide.

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[cesarbenjamindotnet]

I believe there hasn't been much progress because this area is not fully implemented yet. Many parts of the system still depend on direct disk access, and currently there is no way to use Google Cloud Storage seamlessly. More importantly, supporting GCS should really be viewed as supporting cloud storage in general, regardless of the underlying provider.

At the moment, many components—especially the importer—still rely on physical file system access. This prevents the application from working properly with cloud storage backends.

Django already has the django-storages package, which I believe should be the foundation for provider-agnostic cloud storage support. Rather than removing cloud storage support, the storage layer should be refactored so that it no longer depends on physical disk paths.

I believe the proposal to remove cloud storage support is fundamentally misguided. In reality, cloud storage support is still incomplete, and removing it would be a regression rather than an improvement. In my opinion, it is a very poor proposal.