Re: "Exotic" GNATS 4 fields

[Rick Macdonald]

On Tue, 2 Oct 2001, Yngve Svendsen wrote:

> I'd like a comment on the following
> 
> I am just wrapping up the revised chapter 1 of the GNATS 4 manual and I 
> noticed that there are several fields in version 4 that don't have 
> counterparts in standard version 3 installations and which seem to be 
> somewhat "exotic" (i.e. not of use to the majority of GNATS sites). These are:
> 
> "Cases" (I have found no explanation of what it is for)
> "Keywords" (which seem to have little use as long as there aren't any tools 
> for indexing the GNATS database apart from gen-index which doesn't seem to 
> have anything to do with this field)
> "Quarter" (Not exactly sure what this is -- target quarter for a fix?)
> "Release-Note"
> 
> I assume the latter three amount to what makes GNATS "release-based".

I've never heard of "Cases" either.

The three fields added with "released-based" in GNATS 3 were
Date-Required, Quarter and Keywords. In GNATS 3 all three fields are
indeed added to the index, making them just as usful as any other text or
date field, although the name and description of Quarter was for one
particular company.

Release-Note was added as a standard multitext field in GNATS v3.106.

  New PR field "Release-Note:" (multitext)

   The "Release-Note:" field was added for human readable (user
   friendly) comments about problems or fixes (suitable for
   incorporation into release notes for a given software
   distribution).

> I suggest we remove these four fields from the standard dbconfig.in of 
> GNATS 4 and that we subsequently provide another sample dbconfig file for 
> those migrating an older release-based GNATS installation.

I guess I don't have much to say about the defaults for a fresh gnats 4
install. You could remove these 4, or not. 

I haven't looked and how the migration from gnats 3 to gnats 4 is done,
but people don't want to loose any of their old fields accidentally.

...RickM...