Provided by: gnats-user_4.1.0-3_amd64 
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.