GNATS - GNU Problem Report Management System

GNATS, version 3.2,is the GNU Problem Report Management System. It is a bug-tracking tool designed for use at a central Support Site. Users who experience problems use electronic mail to communicate these problems to maintainers (click here to get information for maintainers) at that Support Site. GNATS partially automates the tracking of these Problem Reports (PR)s by:

  1. organizing problem reports into a database and notifying responsible parties of suspected bugs;
  2. allowing support personnel and their managers to edit and query accumulated bugs; and
  3. 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.

You can also access the submitting, editing, and querying functions of GNATS from within GNU Emacs.

The following is an informal flowchart showing the relationship of the GNATS tools to each other and to the files with which they interoperate: 

+===========+    +===========+    +===========+
# USER SITE #    # USER SITE #    # USER SITE #
#           #    #           #    #           #
# *send-pr* #    # *send-pr* #    # *send-pr* #
+=====|=====+    +=====|=====+    +=====|=====+
      |                V                |
      `--------->    Email....  k-------'
                ,--->     |
+===============|=========|===================+
# SUPPORT SITE  |         `---> /etc/aliases  #
#          *send-pr*                |         #
#     +-----------------------------V--------+#
#     | GNATS         GNATS_ROOT/gnats-queue/|#
#     |                             |        |#
#     |        _________            V        |#
#     |       |*file-pr*|k--- *queue-pr -r*  |#
#     |       |         |                    |#
#  _  |       |  valid  |                    |#
# |M| |       |Category?|N--.                |#
# |A| |       |_________|   |      GNATS     |#
# |I| |              Y|     |  ADMINISTRATOR |#
# |N| |               |     |                |#
# |T|k----------------|     |                |#
# |A| |               |     |  .-> *edit-pr* |#
# |I|--->*edit-pr*-.  |     V  |           | |#
# |N| |            |  |GNATS_ROOT/pending  | |#
# |E|k--*query-pr* |  |                    | |#
# |R| |       |    |  |                    | |#
# |S| |       |    V  V                    V |#
# |_| |+------------------------------------+|#
#     ||         GNATS Database             ||#
#     ||   GNATS_ROOT/CATEGORY/GNATS-ID     ||#
#     |+------------------------------------+|#
#     +--------------------------------------+#
+=============================================+
Copyright (c) 1993, Free Software Foundation, Inc. See the file COPYING for copyright information concerning this distribution and all its components.