There is a growing trend of attaching screenshots of stack traces,
code, and debugger sessions to JIRA cases and email threads.
I don't like it. I think we should have a policy discouraging screenshots.
In my opinion, the text is almost always preferable. It can be found
by search engines. It can be included in email messages. (ASF email
strips image attachments.) And for code, links to a line of code in
GitHub are preferable because it allows people to see the context.
When someone logs a bug with an attached PNG of a stack trace, we
should ask them to replace it with the stack trace in text format
(surrounded by {noformat} tags so that JIRA doesn't mangle it).
I will acknowledge that sometimes a screenshot of a debugger is useful
- if it shows state. Still, it needs to be accompanied by an
explanation. ("The code expects to find a key, but the map is empty.")
And perhaps the explanation and a test case would suffice.
What do people think of this?
Julian
