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Preliminary project description.
author David A. Holland
date Sun, 19 Feb 2012 16:26:28 -0500
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Welcome to swallowtail!

swallowtail is a bugtracking system meant to serve as a migration path
for large GNATS installations. It was designed with the following
assumptions:

	- the database and its access tools are to be installed and
	  operating on a project server somewhere such that project
	  members have shell access and outsiders have web access;
	- that project members do not need to be baby-sat;
	- there is a large pre-existing bug database to be imported;
	- the pre-existing database contains fields reflecting the
	  hardcoded GNATS data semantics;
	- hand-editing any substantial fraction of the database is
	  impossible;
	- incoming bug reports are submitted from a deployed base of
	  legacy GNATS send-pr scripts that can be superseded in the
	  wild only gradually;
	- that there are relatively few preexisting database access
	  tools, such that replacing them all is readily feasible;
	- enabling sql-based access to support new and custom tools is
	  more useful and of more interest than providing canned user
	  interface features;
	- the database is too large for manual search, but not
	  necessarily too large for manual or manually-assisted
	  indexing;
	- that multiple types of semantic indexing will be required,
	  and that tools should not have to treat each new index
	  scheme as a fresh special case.

It uses PostgreSQL for data storage. Other required software is as
follows:

	[TBD]