send-pr in Gnats 4

[Yngve Svendsen]

I am finishing up a preliminary installation how-to for Gnats 4.

There is one remaining problem, though. After digging through miles of 
ChangeLogs and some source, I can't seem to reach a definitive conclusion 
about what role 'send-pr' is supposed to have.

From the ChangeLog, I see that all the 'site' functionality has been 
removed. As far as I can see, this means that the functionality for making 
send-pr distributions for remote sites is gone (the mkdist utility), and 
that the focus for send-pr is now on usage on the same network as the Gnats 
server is running on. Thus, send-pr no longer submits PRs by mail as 
default, instead preferring to communicate directly with gnatsd on the server.

However, send-pr seems to be unable to work in a multiple database 
environment when configured to talk directly to gnatsd, since it has no 
options to select a database and does not issue a CHDB after connecting to 
gnatsd. This renders it unusable for sites that have multiple databases or 
that have changed the default database name.

The Emacs interface is also unable to work with multiple databases. I don't 
know much lisp, but from what I can see, the ability to change database has 
been removed entirely from gnats.el

Does anyone know if I am right about these things? And if so, what 
functionality has been removed intentionally and permanently, and what 
functionality remains to be (re-)implemented?

Yngve Svendsen
IS Engineer
Clustra AS, Trondheim, Norway
address@hidden