Re: TkGnats/Gnats general questions

[Rick Macdonald]

On Thu, 4 Oct 2001, Leonardo.Araujo wrote:

> Gday everybody,
> 
> I've got a couple of questions and I would pleased with you guys could help
> me to answer them. I went through both Gnats and TkGnats documentation and
> got some relevant knowledge on some of the questions, but I would like to
> hear from you. Thanks for your valuable time.
> 
> The questions are as follows:
> 
> 1. Is there any practical limit to gnats database size?

Not that I've heard anybody complain about. The most noticible issue is
when you do searches of multitext fields. These searches read and parse
the full text of the messages. All other fields are in the index and the
search is much faster. The trick, then, is to make sure you narrow the
search using indexed fields (state, category, etc) when searching for text
strings in multitext fields. TkGnats (and surely gnatsweb as well) are
great for this because you just click on various field values to constrain
the search.

> 2. Can I determine who is allowed to submit and be responsible for PR's? I
> know about the submitter and responsible files on Gnats, but it seems that
> even if one is not in these files, one is still able to submit PRs.

I don't think there is a supported way to restrict submission of PRs.
Maybe there is in v4? Only people in your responsible file can be
responsible though.

> 3. Is it possible to allow for both mandatory and customized Problem Report
> (PR) fields? 

I'm not sure what you mean here. GNATS v4 can do just about anything with
fields.

> 4. Is the gnats database a reliable, high-performance database? Anyone here
> had previous problem with database corruption, for instance.

It's not a database. Each category is a directory and each PR is a flat
text file witht the original email headers. The index is also a simple
text file with field delimited with the "|" character. Well, that was
gnats v3. The index may have changed in v4 (binary separator?) but it's
still not a database.

> 5. Can we create customized reports?

TkGnats provides for this, but not only do you need to deal with Tcl code,
you have to hand-code troff as well. However, there are two examples to
work from in the "print" subdirectory. Any files added there show up in
the TkGnats Print menu. The reports key off the contents of the listbox
for whatever query constraints you choose. Queries can be saved to the
Query menu for re-occurring queries. Note that TkGnats is not ported to
gnats v4 (no estimate for this).

> 6. Is there gnats/tkgnats tool related to backup and recovery?

No.

> 7. Can we tie two different PRs that could be related each other by the
> nature of the problem (create a link between them)? 

I don't use gnatsweb but I vaguely remember somebody talking about URLs
in PRs to jump from one PR to another.

...RickM...