Keeping Track

Table of Contents

Overview

This manual documents GNATS, the GNU Problem Report Management System, version 4.1.0. 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 The GNATS user tools.