Please "attach" files to bugzilla, instead of pasting into a massive comment

[Mike A. Harris]

Warning: Frustration rant follows.

More and more over time, I am noticing a tendency of bug reporters
adding log files, config files and other large files to bug reports
by cutting and pasting these massive files into the comment box,
instead of attaching them as proper bugzilla file attachements.

As a developer, this is very irritating because it makes the bug
report incredibly long to view.  You have to scroll forever to
get from one comment to the next, with this massive file pasted
in the middle, making it very hard to follow, and thus making
it more difficult to provide help for the problem being reported.

It also causes bugzilla's word-wrap to affect the text being pasted,
which generally breaks patches, making them no longer apply cleanly,
until they're reattached properly as file attachment by the person
who has the original, or causing the developer more work manually
recreating the patch from scratch by hand editing the source and
regenerating it with diff/gendiff.  This also can cause config files
pasted into comments to be distorted and no longer machine parseable,
depending on the syntax of the file, and how the parser that reads
it handles things that have moved from one line to another due to
wordwrapping in bugzilla.

Bugzilla has a file attachment feature, labeled "Create a file
attachment".  If you can not find it, please use your web browser's
search feature to find the link on the bugzilla page, and _always_
attach these files directly as individual uncompressed text files,
so that developers such as myself can bring the file attachments
up in another web browser tab/window with a simple single mouse
click, while still following the bug report.

Bugzilla used to also have a "Create a file attachment" hyperlink
directly under the "Add a comment" window in red font, which the
majority of users seemed to find right away.  Back then, we got
very few 1Mb log files pasted into bug reports making them
unreadable, however nowadays bugzilla has reverted to the old
behaviour, and an ever mounting number of bugs are getting these
massive files pasted into them.

This is very very irritating.  Please help us (developers) to help
you (bug reporters/testers), by using bugzilla properly, and
thinking about what it is like to be on the receiving end of 500
bug reports and get 30 like this.
</rant>


Feature request filed:
     https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=184481



-- 
Mike A. Harris  *  Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
                       Proud Canadian.