Attachments in answer tracker

This is a very much needed feature, or core functionality if I may say.

This feature will be done after bugs can be converted to questions.

so.. this should be done? :)

It would certainly shorten most threads and would make answering less daunting. Sometimes people try to email attachments and we have to admit that we're not as advanced as bug-squad. Makes us look dumb ;) (which i'm quite capable of looking on my own merits, i don't need help with that)

lol good luck and regards from
Tom :)

In trying to resolve a driver problem, I posted as additional information several xorg.0.log files, one of which was quite long in answers.launchpad. Everyone would have been better served if it were possible to attach these files.

It seems out of place for Ubuntu, which gets so many things right, to not allow attachments in answers.launchpad.

I suspect some issues which would be better dealt with in answers get posted as bugs because of this, surely a problem for the bug-squad.

Is anything going to happen with this?

attachments

There are no plans to work on this in the near future. A community contributor can provide this with help from a experienced Launchpad developer. I looked at this issue 2 years ago. I think the fastest way to add attachments to Answers is to rework the bug attachments code to work with both. This will also allow bugs and questions to share attachments if they are linked:

Phase 1:
* Rename BugAttachment to MessageAttachment in the DB
* Add a Question column
* Rename the BugAttachment model to MessageAttachment
* Add the question attribute
* Update all the code to use MessageAttachment instead of BugAttachment.

Phase 2:
* Added the Attachment's field to Question
* Extract bug attachment forms and view helpers to a mixin
* Add the mixin back to the bug views so that there is no functional change.
* Use the mixins in new Question views to make the new feature visible.

Phase 3:
* Update the createQuestionFromBug and bug linking code to update the attachments bug and question so that the attachment is shared.

Can someone give any reasoning on why "There are no plans to work on this in the near future." This is a critical and BASIC feature that needs to be added. I just spent 10 minutes trying to attach a file to help a new Ubuntu and new Launchpad user fix their problem - then I found out I couldn't, so I have to spend time now holding-his-hand to fix his problem when a screenshot would have made us both happy. Attaching files to a Question should have been apart of Launchpad since its first release.

There are no engineers assigned to work on the answers application. Answers, like Blueprints, relies on contributors to commit to a releasing a fix. No one disagree that attachments are needed, but eveyone believes they have more important things to do.

For me this is an important feature.

I am sorry I can not contribute any code, but as I am contributing answers this is a very important point:
Users that are having questions or problems with Ubuntu that require screenshots have another hurdle (= problem) to overcome when they need to go to some random upload service and post the link in the question.

And that’s if they know about image uploading services in the first place. Oftentimes you need to instruct them after they post addresses like: /home/username/screenshot.jpg – that is just embarassing for users and another problem.

*As a workaround* attachments can be uploaded to your wiki page at wiki.ubuntu.com. Additionally, Shutter (a screenshot tool available in Ubuntu) can upload automatically to several image sharing services.

Confirming this would be of tremendous help while answering questions, and a great way to facilitate low-level participation in the projects.

This is absolutely critical and should have been implemented from the very beginning.

I don't want too be a "me-too-ish" but having used the answer tracker for Inkscape project I've to say this is very much needed. People are using external host and files get eventually lost, which makes revisiting questions months later much harder.

7 years have passed now... And we're still desperate to give users the best possible experience here. Is there really nobody who could take a look into this very useful feature?

I just got told that my bug #1587456 is a duplicate of this one. I am surprised that a bug 9 and a half years old is still open. I'd suggest that it wouold make some sense to get this done.

I'd do it myself, but it's a bit beyond me.