Bugs overview page shows "Ask a question" link although LP Answers disabled

[Andrew Johnson]

The epics-base project uses LP for Bugs, but not Answers. Our project Overview page https://launchpad.net/epics-base shows that under "Uses Launchpad for:" and in the "Get Involved" box it shows the link for "Report a bug". However the equivalent box on the Bugs page https://bugs.launchpad.net/epics-base also shows a link for "Ask a question". A project should be able to completely disable the Answers functionality so that the "Ask" link is not shown and users who visit the Answers page see a similar thing to the Translations page, which explicitly says "This project is not using Launchpad for translations."

[Graham Binns (gmb)]

This is an easy fix and, whilst we don't have room in the bugs schedule at the moment to deal with it I'd be happy to mentor anyone who wanted to take a crack at it.

To fix this we need to:

 1. Alter the bugs front page template for a project to make it only show the 'Ask a question' button when the project uses Answers.
 2. Add a story / pagetest to demonstrate that this is the case.

[Andrew Johnson (anj)]

I don't mind taking a look at this, but the machines here only run Fedora and RHEL, so I won't be able to test my patches here.

I have a local branch of the lp:launchpad/devel code, and it looks like the "Ask a question" link in lib/lp/bugs/templates/bugtarget-bugs.pt is already conditional on addquestion_url but I have no idea how to modify the logic in lib/lp/bugs/browser/bugtask.py to determine whether to display it or not.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

On 13 May 2010 22:41, Andrew Johnson <email address hidden> wrote:
> I don't mind taking a look at this, but the machines here only run
> Fedora and RHEL, so I won't be able to test my patches here.

You could set up a chroot using a procedure like
<https://dev.launchpad.net/Running/Schroot> though you probably won't
have the debootstrap script. Or use an entire vm.

--
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>

[Andrew Johnson (anj)]

Martin Pool suggested:
> You could set up a chroot using a procedure like
> <https://dev.launchpad.net/Running/Schroot> though you probably won't
> have the debootstrap script. Or use an entire vm.

Those schroot instructions say:
> These instructions will help you run Launchpad in a guest OS:
> * on an earlier or later version of Ubuntu
> * on Debian or another derivative

neither of which I have here, just FC10 and RHEL5. I work at a government lab, where IT don't like VMs because they can't keep them patched (but I'm still running FC10, go figure!). This is not a sufficiently vital project for me to push for an exception, unfortunately.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

I added to <https://dev.launchpad.net/Running/Schroot> a link on how to do this on other linux distributions (thanks) but I realize it may still not be possible.

[Curtis Hovey (sinzui)]

The fix for this is simple. There are many places in bugs where Lp tests for the availability of the service.
    if IServiceUsage(self.context).answers_usage:

[scoder (scoder)]

Note that this is not just a "confusing UI" problem. It makes users post their questions at the wrong place, which leads to an annoying duplication of work as, first, someone has to tell them to repost their request elsewhere, and then they have to repost it elsewhere. So it's payed in time and sweat by multiple people each time.

Until this bug gets fixed, it would be nice to at least advertise it prominently, so that it's easier to divert the resulting complains.