GNATS is a bug-tracking tool designed for use at a central support site. Software users who experience problems use electronic mail to communicate these problems to the the maintainers of that software; GNATS partially automates the tracking of these problems by:
· organizing problem reports into a database and notifying responsible parties of suspected bugs;
· allowing support personnel and their managers to edit, query and report on accumulated bugs; and
· providing a reliable archive of problems with a given program and a history of the life of the program by preserving its reported problems and their subsequent solutions.
GNATS offers many of the same features offered by more generic databases. You can query and edit existing problem reports (PRs) as well as obtain reports on groups of PRs. The database itself is simply an ordered repository for problem reports; each PR receives a unique, incremental PRnumber, which identifies it throughout its lifetime.