7 GNATS

The FreeBSD Project utilizes GNATS for tracking bugs and change requests. Be sure that if you commit a fix or suggestion found in a GNATS PR, you use edit-pr pr-number on freefall to close it. It is also considered nice if you take time to close any PRs associated with your commits, if appropriate. You can also make use of send-pr(1) yourself for proposing any change which you feel should probably be made, pending a more extensive peer-review first.

You can find out more about GNATS at:

You can run a local copy of GNATS, and then integrate the FreeBSD GNATS tree by creating an rsync mirror. Then you can run GNATS commands locally, allowing you to query the PR database without an Internet connection.

7.1 Mirroring the GNATS Tree

It is possible to mirror the GNATS database by installing net/rsync, and executing:

% rsync -va rsync://bit0.us-west.freebsd.org/FreeBSD-bit/gnats .

7.2 Useful Tools

Other than edit-pr there are a collection of tools in ~gnats/tools/ on freefall which can make working with PRs much easier.

open-pr, close-pr, take-pr, and feedback-pr take PR numbers as arguments and then ask you to select from a preexisting list of change reasons or let you type in your own.

change-pr is a multi purpose tool that lets you make multiple changes at the same time with one command.

For example, to assign PR 123456 to yourself type take-pr 123456. If you want to set the PR to patched awaiting an MFC at the same time use: change-pr -t -p -m "awaiting MFC" 123456