gnats - Problem Report Management System

GNATS is a bug-tracking tool designed for use at a central support site. Software users who experience problems use tools provided with GNATS to submit Problem Reports to the the maintainers of that software; GNATS partially automates the tracking of these problems by:

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organizing problem reports into a database and notifying responsible parties of suspected bugs;

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allowing support personnel and their managers to edit, query and report on accumulated bugs; and

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providing a reliable archive of problems with a given program and a history of the life of the program by preserving its reported problems and their subsequent solutions.

GNATS offers many of the same features offered by more generic databases. You can query and edit existing problem reports (PRs) as well as obtain reports on groups of PRs. The database itself is simply an ordered repository for problem reports; each PR receives a unique, incremental PR number which identifies it throughout its lifetime.

Many of the primary functions available with GNATS are accessible from within GNU Emacs.

PRs go through several states in their lifetimes. The set of states is site-specific.

The default set of states are:

open

the initial state of every PR; this means the PR has been filed and the person or group responsible for it has been notified of the suspected problem

analyzed

the problem has been examined and work toward a solution has begun

feedback

a solution has been found and tested at the support site, and sent to the party who reported the problem; that party is testing the solution

closed

the solution has been confirmed by the party which reported it

In some cases, it may be necessary to suspend work on a bug; in this case, its state changes to suspended rather than closed.

Incoming PRs are assigned an incremental serial number and filed according to category. An index is kept concurrently to accelerate searches of the database.

All GNATS administration and database files are located in subdirectories of a directory associated with each database. Databases are named, and the association between database names and directories is described by the databases file, which is found on this system in /usr/etc/gnats/databases.

Problem Reports are segregated into subdirectories within the database directory by category. For example, problems submitted with a category of gcc will be filed in the database subdirectory gcc.

GNATS administration files are kept in the database subdirectory gnats-adm:

Keeping Track: Managing Messages With GNATS (also installed as the GNU Info file gnats.info)

databases(5), dbconfig(5), delete-pr(8), edit-pr(1) file-pr(8), gen-index(8), gnats(7), gnatsd(8), mkcat(8), mkdb(8), pr-edit(8), query-pr(1), queue-pr(8), send-pr(1).

GNATS was greatly inspired by the BSD sendbug(1) and bugfiler(8) programs. It was originally written in C++, Elisp, shell script, and awk. It presently consists of utilities written in C, shell script, and Elisp.

GNATS was originally written by Heinz G. Seidl (Cygnus Support). Subsequent iterations were developed by Brendan Kehoe (Cygnus Support) and Jason Merrill (Cygnus Support), with help from Tim Wicinski. Documentation was initially developed by Jeffrey Osier (Cygnus Support) and Brendan Kehoe (Cygnus Support).

Version 4.x was a substantial rewrite done by Bob Manson (Juniper Networks), Milan Zamazal and Yngve Svendsen (Clustra Systems / Sun Microsystems)

Copyright (c) 1992, 1993, 1999, 2000, 2003, Free Software Foundation

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