It is in your best interest as the maintainer of a body of work to organize the feedback you receive on that work, and to make it easy for users of your work to report problems and suggestions.
GNATS makes this easy by automatically filing incoming problem reports into appropriate places, by notifying responsible parties of the existence of the problem and (optionally) sending an acknowledgement to the submitter that the report was received, and by making these Problem Reports accessible to queries and easily editable. GNATS is a database specialized for a specific task.
GNATS was designed for use at a Support Site that handles a high level of problem-related traffic though electronic mail. It maintains Problem Reports in the form of text files with defined fields (see section Problem Report format). The location of the database, as well as the categories it accepts as valid, the maintainers for whom it provides service, and the submitters from whom it accepts Problem Reports, are all definable by the Support Site. See section GNATS Administration.
Each PR is a separate file within a main repository
(see section Where GNATS lives). Editing access to the
database is regulated to maintain consistency, but anyone with
electronic mail access may submit Problem Reports. To make queries on
the database faster, an index is kept automatically (see section The index file).
We provide several software tools so that users may submit new Problem Reports, edit existing Problem Reports, and query the database.
send-pr is used by both product maintainers and the end users
of the products they support to submit PRs to the database.
edit-pr is used by maintainers to use when editing problem
reports in the database.
query-pr to
make inquiries about indidvidual PRs or groups of PRs.
send-pr can also be packaged by itself and distributed to anyone
you wish to receive Problem Reports from; see section Configuring send-pr for the outside world.
At the Support Site, a GNATS administrator is charged with the
duty of maintaining GNATS. These duties are discussed in detail in
section GNATS Administration, and generally include
configuring GNATS for the Support Site, editing PRs that GNATS
cannot process, pruning log files, setting up new problem categories,
backing up the database, and distributing send-pr so that others
may submit Problem Reports.
Responsibility for a given Problem Report depends on the category of the problem. Optionally, an automated reminder can be sent to the responsible person if a problem report is neglected for a requisite time period. See section Changing your local configuration.
GNATS does not have the ability to decipher random text, so any problem reports which arrive in a format GNATS does not recognize are placed in a separate directory pending investigation by the GNATS administrator (see section GNATS Administration).
Once a problem is recorded in the database, work can begin toward a solution. A problem's initial state is `open' (see section States of Problem Reports). An acknowledgement is sent to the originator of the bug report (if that feature of GNATS is activated). GNATS forwards copies of the report to the party responsible for that problem category and to the person responsible for problems arriving from that Submitter Site.
When a problem has been identified, the maintainer can change its state to `analyzed', and then to `feedback' when a solution is found. Each time the state of a PR changes, the submitter of the problem report is notified of the reason for the change. If the party responsible for the PR changes, the previous responsible party and the new responsible party receive notice of the change. The change and reason are also recorded in the `>Audit-Trail:' field of the Problem Report. (See section Editing existing Problem Reports. For information on the `>Audit-Trail:' field, see section Problem Report format.)
When the originator of the Problem Report confirms that the solution works, the maintainer can change the state to closed. If the PR cannot be closed, the maintainer can change its state to suspended as a last resort. (For a more detailed description of these states, see section States of Problem Reports.)
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