Provided by: gnats-user_4.1.0-5_amd64 bug

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 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 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 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:

       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 levels 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/libexec/gnats while those meant for public use are installed in /usr/bin.

       /usr/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/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  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), 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 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.