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1.1 What is GNATS?

GNATS is the GNU problem report management system. Problem report management systems are also known as "bug-tracking systems", though the entries need not be bugs (e.g., think of change requests). The acronym stands for "GNats: A Tracking System".

GNATS stores all information about the problem reports at a central site, and enables users to access this site by various means, including e-mail, WWW, and a network daemon. New problem reports can be created, and existing reports can be queried and updated, by most of these means.

GNATS is widely customizable: Of course you can define report categories (is the report about tool A or service B?), responsibles (who takes care of this report?), and submitters (is it from customer1 or from the sales department?). You can also define possible states of a report (open, analyzed, closed, etc.) and classes (software bug, documentation bug, change request, …).

Starting with GNATS 4.0, you can define your own custom fields, and customize many of the built-in fields; you can have fields automatically set to a certain value when another field changes its contents (e.g., set a "Closed-Date" field to the current date when the report goes to state "closed", and unset it when it goes back from "closed" to something else), or when the report is changed at all (e.g., to maintain a "Last-Modified" field).

1.1.1 How it Works—User’s View   Short overview for users
1.1.2 How it Works—Administrator’s View   Short overview for system administrators
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1.1.1 How it Works—User’s View

Users enter their problem reports (PRs) via some front-end. This front-end either directly contacts the GNATS server, or sends the report via e-mail. (The server is available since about version 3.90 of GNATS). For an incomplete list of front-ends see Client Software.

Some front-ends (like TkGnats, see TkGnats) are capable of contacting several GNATS servers, or several problem report databases managed by the same GNATS server.

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1.1.2 How it Works—Administrator’s View

The server is started by a super-server like inetd or xinetd. It has a built-in access control mechanism based on IP addresses and username/password.

For users sending their PRs via e-mail, some mail addresses must be configured.

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