Thoughts on gnatsweb

[Tom Tromey]

I've been using gnatsweb for a while now, maybe a couple of years, and
I have noticed a few things which I find annoying.  I hesitate to call
them bugs exactly, because they don't actually get in the way of my
use of gnatsweb.  (And, FWIW, in general I like gnatsweb quite a bit.)


One thing that is annoying is that sometimes gnatsweb forgets that I
can log in to a database.  For instance, on the gcc web pages there
are links like this:

    
http://gcc.gnu.org/cgi-bin/gnatsweb.pl?user=guest&password=guest&database=gcc&cmd=login

This is supposed to take you to the gcc gnats page.

Well, this is annoying because if I already have a gnats account for
this database, and I'm already logged in, following this link will log
me in again as `guest'.  I think either links like this shouldn't log
me in again, or it should be possible to specify a default
user/password pair (perhaps in the site config file) and then simply
leave them out of the URL in the link.


My next problem with gnatsweb is that I tend to like to go to a
particular query result page and do my work from there.  Unfortunately
this is not entirely doable because there is no way to create a new PR
from the query page.  In fact, if you save a link to your stored query
(so you can jump directly to it without intervening steps) then you
have no way to go from the query page back to the main page or
anyplace else.

I think this problem could be solved using some kind of navigation bar
that would show up even on the query page.  I think it would be
sufficient to have buttons going to `main page', `query', and
`advanced query'.


A while back I reported some problems involving using Gnatsweb on two
databases on the same host at the same time.  I haven't tried this
lately, so I don't know if these problems are fixed.  I imagine that I
sent them to address@hidden  Does anybody know if anything has
changed here?

Tom