Re: gnatsweb creates PR's when I edit a gdb PR

[Jason Molenda <jason@molenda.com>]

On Fri, Feb 16, 2001 at 12:31:44AM -0800, Michael Elizabeth Chastain wrote:
> I'm not sure if this is the right list.  If not, kindly redirect me.

It's the kind of thing that could be asked on the general gdb lists or
something like that.  The charter for this list is pretty loose.

> When I edit a PR in gdb gnats, gnats sometimes creates a new PR
> of category "pending".  gdb/17 and gdb/21 are two such PR's.

gnats has a single e-mail address where both new PRs and additions to
PRs are sent.

Many follow-ups, changes, modifications to PRs are done by e-mail.
If you want to add a note to gdb/15, you send a mail note to
gdb-gnats@sourceware.cygnus.com with a subject line like "Re: gdb/15
blah blah blah".

The program at gdb-gnats@ looks at the Subject: line of all incoming
mail notes.  If the note _appears_ to be a follow-up to an existing 
PR, it appends the note to that PR.  However, if it _doesn't_ appear
to be a follow-up to an existing PR, gnats assumes that it is a _new_
PR.

If a new PR is not properly formatted, that PR is stuck in the 'pending'
category, meaning that gnats didn't know what to do with it.  A well
formed PR has fields like

>Category:       gdb
>Synopsis:       lookup_block_symbol ignores namespace parameter in binary search
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       critical
>Priority:       high

If an incoming new PR doesn't have fields like this, gnats punts.




So, after the background explanation, the problem here is obvious.
Your follow-up changes have a subject line that's been modified so
that gnats doesn't recognize it as a follow-on to an existing PR.
gnats tries to treat your message as a new PR, but is not a properly
formatted PR, so gnats dumps it into pending.

Look at gdb/17 - your subject is "Re: gdb/gdb/15".  What program
did you use to make this change to gdb/15?  gnatsweb, tkgnats,
nedit-pr, gnats.el?  Did you modify the Subject header yourself or
just use the one that the program supplied?


> What are these PR's?  What should I do about them?

The gnats administrator for your database should (a) redirect any
pending PRs to appropriate categories if they're legitimate PRs,
or (b) close out mistakes that gnats dumped into pending.


Jason Molenda
"love with fear and loathing"