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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Those would be useful but I guess in terms of issue-reporting, screenshots are universally valuable for showing erroneous program behavior...when would other filetypes be useful for that, except in cases of programs that are designed to output such filetypes (attaching an ODF would be useful for an ODF generator, for instance)?

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Not just outputs, but also inputs. As a hypothetical example, if I had a project that processed MP3 files, and it had bugs on certain files, it would be nice to be able to attach the MP3 files that triggered the bugs to an issue.

Would it not be useful to have test cases covering the broken behaviour (making it not specific to the issue, but rather stuff you could add in a commit)?

We're talking about issues reporting here, if there's a bug with a file being able to include the file itself (by the original reporter or somebody else) is valuable.

Core dumps and lengthy stacktraces spring to my mind.

Can use Gist for these.

That's not super obvious or convenient for new or casual users. You could make the same argument about images; Just make a new repository (or gist) and put an image in it, then link to it!

This new way is much better.

Since there are no organization private gists [1] you can't use that method for private repositories.

[1] A gist can only be "private" in the sense that it's not listed on the public gist page. No access control takes place once someone guesses the url. That's probably good enough for most uses, but not for all.

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