GNATS

Section: Problem Report Management System (l)
Updated: April 1993
Index Return to Main Contents
 

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 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; 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 @GNATS_ROOT@ 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 @GNATS_ROOT@/gcc.

GNATS administration files are kept in @GNATS_ROOT@/gnats-adm:

categories
table of valid categories and parties responsible for them
responsible
table of responsible parties and their email addresses
submitters
optional 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 @GNATS_ROOT@/gnats-bin, while those meant for public use are installed in @PREFIX@/bin.

@GNATS_ROOT@/gnats-bin contains the programs:

mkcat
used by the GNATS administrator to create new categories
mkdist
used by the GNATS administrator to create a distribution of send-pr
file-pr
main administrative program which files incoming PRs and controls 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)
at-pr
automatically notifies responsible parties if a PR is not analyzed within a requisite period defined in the submitters file.

Programs intended for public use include:

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

gnats.texi and send-pr.texi, which are also installed as GNU Info files gnats.info and send-pr.info;

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), with help from Tim Wicinski. Documentation was developed by Jeffrey Osier and Brendan Kehoe (Cygnus Support).  

COPYING

Copyright (c) 1992, 1993 Cygnus Support

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.


 

Index

NAME
DESCRIPTION
PROBLEM REPORT STATES
STRUCTURE
SEE ALSO
HISTORY
AUTHORS
COPYING

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