Keeping Track

Managing Messages With GNATS
The GNU Problem Report Management System
Version 4.0-beta1
December 2001
 

This manual documents GNATS, the GNU Problem Report Management System, version 4.0-beta1. GNATS is a bug-tracking tool designed for use at a central Support Site. Users who experience problems use electronic mail, web-based or other clients communicating with the GNATS network daemon running at the support site or direct database submissions to communicate these problems to maintainers at that Support Site. GNATS partially automates the tracking of these Problem Reports (PRs) by:

• organizing problem reports into a database and notifying responsible parties of suspected bugs;

• allowing support personnel and their managers to edit and query accumulated bugs; and

• providing a reliable archive of problems (and their subsequent solutions) with a given program.

GNATS offers many of the same features offered by more generalized databases, including editing, querying, and basic reporting. The GNATS database itself is an ordered repository for problem reports; each PR receives a unique, incremental PR number which identifies it throughout its lifetime. For a discussion on the working system adopted by GNATS, see The database paradigm.

You can access the submitting, editing, and querying functions of GNATS from within GNU Emacs. See section The GNATS user tools.

Note on this version of the manual

This manual is in the process of being revised for version 4 of GNATS. The status of the different sections is as follows:

• Chapter 1 Introducing GNATS
  Version 4 complete, except for mention of the Cases, Keywords, Quarter and Release Note fields which may or may not make it into final version 4.

• Chapter 2 The GNATS User Tools
  Version 4 complete, except for the sections on send-pr.

• Chapter 3 Installing GNATS
  Version 4 complete, except for info on installing the user tools at remote locations which is yet to be written.

• Chapter 4 GNATS Administration
  Version 4 complete, except for treatment of the still-to-be-written gnats-passwd.

• Appendix A Where GNATS lives
  Version 4 complete.

• Appendix B The GNATS network server -- gnatsd
  Version 4 complete.

• Appendix C Controlling access to databases
  Version 4 complete.

• Appendix D Querying using regular expressions
  Version 4 complete.

1. Introducing GNATS
2. The GNATS User Tools		The GNATS user tools.
3. Installing GNATS
4. GNATS Administration
A. Where GNATS lives
B. The GNATS network server -- gnatsd		The GNATS network server.
C. Controlling access to databases		Controlling access to GNATS databases.
D. Querying using regular expressions
E. GNATS support		GNATS related sites and mailing lists.
Index