3.8.1 Overview

Although almost all of the GNATS internals have been redesigned and rewritten for GNATS 4, little has changed in the format and structure of the database data. The only change that needs to be taken into account when upgrading is the fact that the database index format is binary in a default installation of GNATS 4. Thus, you will need to regenerate your database index by using the gen-index tool. In addition, if your old GNATS installation was so-called “release-based”, you need to make some simple modifications to the database setup file ‘dbconfig’. See below for details.

Apart from building and installing new binaries, the major changes which impinge on the upgrade procedure are all on the configuration side. The main database configuration file, ‘dbconfig’, is far more complex and powerful than the old ‘config’ file, and while the installation process creates a sensible set of default values which are similar to GNATS 3.11x’s defaults, you still need to migrate any changes you may have made to your own local configuration.

Another aspect which needs consideration are remote submitter sites. Such sites either need to be instructed to upgrade their locally installed copies of the GNATS user tools (send-pr, edit-pr and query-pr), or they should be given access through interfaces such as Gnatsweb.

Since the GNATS network daemon has been completely reworked, with an entirely new command set, all network-based interfaces, such as Gnatsweb and TkGnats need to be upgraded to versions that support GNATS 4. The ‘contrib’ directory of this distribution contains some third-party interfaces, and the ‘README’ file contains pointers to where you can obtain the newest versions of these tools.

This document only deals with upgrading GNATS itself. Third-party tools should have separate upgrading instructions in their distributions.

This document was generated by Chad Walstrom on March 3, 2015 using texi2html 1.82.