GNATS(l) GNATS 3.2 (April 1993) GNATS(l)
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:
o organizing problem reports into a database and
notifying responsible parties of suspected bugs;
o allowing support personnel and their managers to edit,
query and report on accumulated bugs; and
o 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 defined states in their lifetimes.
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;
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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 top-level directory signified with the
variable GNATS_ROOT. The directory has been set on this site
to /usr/freeware/lib/gnats/gnats-db and contains all Problem
Reports segregated into subdirectories by category. For
example, problems submitted with a category of gcc will be
filed in the directory /usr/freeware/lib/gnats/gnats-db/gcc.
GNATS administration files are kept in
/usr/freeware/lib/gnats/gnats-db/gnats-adm:
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; do not touch this file
index database index which is managed internally;
do not touch this file
Administrative programs and programs internal to GNATS are
kept in the directory @PREFIX@/lib while those meant for
public use are installed in @PREFIX@/bin.
@PREFIX@/lib contains the programs:
mkcat used by the GNATS administrator to create new
categories
rmcat used by the GNATS administrator to remove
outdated categories
gen-index used by the GNATS administrator to obtain a
copy of the index
mkdist used by the GNATS administrator to create a
distribution of send-pr
queue-pr mail control program which accepts incoming
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messages and periodically submits them to the
database via cron by feeding them through the
program file-pr(8)
file-pr main administrative program which files
incoming PRs and controls the index
at-pr automatically notifies responsible parties if
a PR is not analyzed within a requisite
period defined in the submitters file.
driver for edit-pr.
@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(l), send-pr(1), edit-pr(1), query-pr(1), file-pr(8),
queue-pr(8), rmcat(8), gen-index(8), mkdist(8).
send-pr(1), query-pr(1), edit-pr(1), file-pr(8), queue-
pr(8), mkcat(8), rmcat(8), gen-index(8), mkdist(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 developed by
Jeffrey Osier (Cygnus Support) and Brendan Kehoe (Cygnus
Support).
COPYING
Copyright (c) 1992, 1993 Free Software Foundation
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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.
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