Trying to comment without login should show the login page

[Uphaar Agrawalla]

When trying to comment on a bug without having logged in, malone displays this (plain text) error:

"Application error

When trying to comment on a bug without having logged in, malone displays this (plain text) error: "Application error. Unauthenticated user POSTing to page that requires authentication." Pressing the Back button from the above error makes you lose whatever was typed.

Launchpad should instead show the login page and then submit the comment automatically, provided the login is correct. To do this, the login page needs to:
  - be able to be conjured at any URL (since the form post targets a specific URL)
  - be prepared to pack and forward all variables POSTed to it into the original URL once a successful login is performed.

[Christian Reis (kiko)]

Normally, you dupe newer bugs against older bugs, not the reverse. Given there was no content on the original one, I'll let this one lie, though.

[Christian Reis (kiko)]

To get this right, the login page needs to:

  - Be able to be conjured at any URL (since the form post targets a specific URL)
  - Be prepared to pack and forward all variables POSTed to it into the original URL once a successful login is performed.

[Uphaar Agrawalla (uphaar)]

"Normally, you dupe newer bugs against older bugs, not the reverse."

Yes, I'm aware of that...

"Given there was no content on the original one, I'll let this one lie, though."

This is exactly why I did it that way. Still, apologies for going the wrong way :-)

[Brad Bollenbach (bradb)]

kiko, you outline two good points for how this may be solved, but to make this require even /less/ short-term memory exertion from the user, should we add a third step to this solution?

  - Allow the Login button to be customized with "Login & $description_of_action" (e.g. "Login and add comment")

[Christian Reis (kiko)]

I have no opinion on that, though I imagine mpt does. I think the page could be styled differently to indicate the user is going through authentication to perform a specific action, but a) I don't think that's a requirement b) I don't know if changing just the button is enough.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Ideally the interstitial login page would say "To <X>, you must log in", where X was the thing you were trying to do. But I imagine implementing <X> for every page and form in Launchpad would be fiendishly difficult. For starters, <X> could be written as "continue", with the button also being labelled "Continue".

[Christian Reis (kiko)]

I'm about to commit to PQM a fix which hides the comment box and adds a link if you're not logged in. It's not a complete fix, however, because you might get logged out in another page or because the server was bounced. A complete fix still requires which I posted about before.