GNATS

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Issue tracking software

title: "GNATS" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["free-project-management-software", "gnu-project-software"] description: "Issue tracking software" topic_path: "general/free-project-management-software" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNATS" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary Issue tracking software ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox software"]

Field	Value
name	GNATS
developer	Chad Walstrom
released
latest_release_version	4.2.0
latest_release_date
programming language	C
operating_system	Cross-platform
genre	Bug tracking system
license	GPL
website
::

GNATS is a set of tools for tracking bugs reported by users to a central site. It allows problem report management and communication with users via various means. GNATS stores all the information about problem reports in its databases and provides tools for querying, editing, and maintenance of the databases.

GNATS is free software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Usage

GNATS is used by GNU packages and NetBSD. The Apache Software Foundation used the software from 1996 to 2002, and the Mutt project until 2006. It is also used, or was used in the past, by the FreeBSD Project, OpenBSD, Juniper Networks, Nordic Optical Telescope, CERN, Green Bank Telescope, NRAO AIPS++, European Software Institute, and the BaBar Project at SLAC.

In early June 2014, FreeBSD announced concrete plans to migrate from GNATS to Bugzilla, claiming that Bugzilla supports finer granularity for categories and keywords. Furthermore, the announcement states that GNATS is missing many features that people expect from a modern bug tracker.

It has been described as having been "the cornerstone" of free software bug-tracking systems.

History

GNATS was written by Heinz G. Seidl of Cygnus Solutions, inspired by BSD Unix's sendbug and filebug programs, and had its first stable release in 1992. During the 1990s, other Cygnus employees rewrote it, and a further major rewrite was done for release 4, with other features contributed by users.

Although GNATS is still in use, development slowed since the 4.1 release in 2005. Several changes lingered in the developers' source code repository, and a 4.2 release was discussed in 2012 but no official release was made until some further development, leading to release 4.2.0 on 28 February 2015.

Features

Built as a client-server architecture, GNATS works with many interfaces (described below) including email, command line, and web interfaces. All GNATS databases and configuration can be stored in plain text files, which helps in the modularity of GNATS. Categorisation and recategorisation of bug reports is particularly simple.

Interfaces

Four official interfaces exist for GNATS: ;Gnatsweb:A Web interface to query and open tickets, with GNATS running as a background process (a "daemon") ;Emacs GNATS mode:An extension (a "major mode") for GNU Emacs and XEmacs allowing direct access to GNAT issue-trackers ;send-pr / edit-pr / query-pr: The traditional command line interface to create, edit, and query Problem Reports ;TkGnats:A cross-platform application, written in the Tcl/Tk language

Apart from these, custom ones can be developed such as OpenBSD's sendbug interface which collects system information and submits Problem Reports via email.

References

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::