gnats(7)

NAME
gnats - Problem Report Management System

DESCRIPTION
GNATS is a bug-tracking tool designed for use at a central support site. Software users who experience problems use electronic mail to communicate these problems to the the maintainers of that software; GNATS partially automates the tracking of these problems by:

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

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

•   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 PRnumber, which identifies it throughout its lifetime.

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

PROBLEM REPORT STATES
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.

STRUCTURE
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 @PREFIX@/share/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:

dbconfig
    describes the structure of the database, and various database-specific options

categories
    table of valid categories and parties responsible for them

responsible
    table of responsible parties and their email addresses

submitters
    database of sites which submit PRs

current
    keeps track of incremental PR numbers assigned

index
    database index

Administrative programs and programs internal to GNATS are kept in the directory @PREFIX@/libexec/gnats while those meant for public use are installed in @PREFIX@/bin.

@PREFIX@/libexec/gnats contains the programs:

mkdb
    used by the GNATS administrator to create a new database

mkcat
    used by the GNATS administrator to create new categories [obsolete]

rmcat
    used by the GNATS administrator to remove outdated categories [obsolete]

gen-index
    used by the GNATS administrator to generate a new version of the index

queue-pr
    mail control program which accepts incoming messages and periodically submits them to the database via cron by feeding them through the program file-pr(8)

pr-edit
    program which is mainly responsible for editing existing PRs and filing new ones; it is used by edit-pr and file-pr

file-pr
    script which uses pr-edit to file new PRs

at-pr
    automatically notifies responsible parties if a PR is not analyzed within a requisite period defined in the submitters file

delete-pr
    used to delete closed PRs

@PREFIX@/bin contains the programs

query-pr
    used to query the database

edit-pr
    used to edit individual PRs

send-pr
    used to submit problems to GNATS

Documentation exists for all programs associated with GNATS.

SEE ALSO
Keeping Track: Managing Messages With GNATS (also installed as the GNU Info file gnats.info) and Reporting Problems Using send-pr (also installed as the GNU Info file send-pr.info).

gnats(7), send-pr(1), edit-pr(1), query-pr(1), file-pr(8), queue-pr(8), delete-pr(8), mkcat(8), mkdb(8), rmcat(8), gen-index(8), pr-edit(8)

HISTORY
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.

AUTHORS
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).

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

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be included in translations approved by the Free Software Foundation instead of in the original English.