[wishlist] choose-affected-product bug filing form link should append attachments and/or links to upstream reports

[Dominic Evans]

If a launchpad bug already has attachments on it (e.g., Dependencies.txt generated by ubuntu-bug / apport, or screenshots etc.) hosted on http://launchpadlibrarian.net/ then links to these files should be appended to the description that is automatically appended as suffixes at the bottom of the description field of the upstream bug tracker

e.g.,

http://launchpadlibrarian.net/25818330/Dependencies.txt (6.9 KiB, text/plain; charset="utf-8")

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

In general, I agree when forwarding bugs upstream it needs to be easier to send relevant attachments as well. I tire of individually downloading and re-uploading attachments to the other tracker; computers excel at copying files, so mine ought to do this copying for me!

However, I think this is not quite so simple.

First, on many bugs there may be a lot of attachments which are not relevant. For instance, the reporter may have posted a sequence of log files as they test out newer versions; in such a case only the latest log file is relevant and posting all of them may just lead to confusion. Or several people may have 'me-too-ed' onto the bug with their files, but upstream would find it confusing to have these conflated with the original reporter's.

Second, many times when I've upstreamed bugs if I give a link to the file, upstream gets fussy and demands that the file itself be uploaded to their tracker. I've seen this with both bugzilla.freedesktop.org and debian BTS. The one exception is if the file is so large as to be rejected by the tracker.

Thus, I think:
  * The files should be copied into the remote tracker, not just linked.
  * The files to send should be limited to just ones from the original reporter
  * There should be some way to select a subset of the files to send. (Checkbox lists?)
  * If file is too large for the remote tracker, *then* do it as a link