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gnats(7) Problem Report Management System 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
tools provided with GNATS to submit Problem Reports to the
the maintainers of that software; GNATS partially auto-
mates 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 pro-
gram 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 prob-
lem 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, incremen-
tal PR number 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 concur-
rently 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/local/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 subdi-
rectory gnats-adm:
addresses contains mappings between submitter IDs and
corresponding e-mail addresses
categories table of valid categories and parties
responsible for them
classes table of valid classes of Problem Reports
current keeps track of incremental PR numbers
assigned
dbconfig describes the structure of the database,
and various database-specific options
gnatsd.user_access
lists host names and access levels of hosts
authorized to access the database
gnatsd.user_access
lists user names, passwords and access lev-
els of users authorized to access the
database
index database index
locks directory containing lock files
responsible table of responsible parties and their
email addresses
states table of valid states of Problem Reports
submitters database of sites which submit PRs
Administrative programs and programs internal to GNATS are
kept in the directory /usr/local/libexec/gnats while those
meant for public use are installed in /usr/local/bin.
/usr/local/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
/usr/local/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)
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).
HISTORY
GNATS was greatly inspired by the BSD sendbug(1) and bug-
filer(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), Milan Zamazal and Yngve Svendsen
(Clustra Systems / Sun Microsystems)
COPYING
Copyright (c) 1992, 1993, 1999, 2000, 2003, 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 ver-
sions 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 con-
ditions 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.
GNATS August 2003 gnats(7)