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Ferret support - How to get the help you need
Our goal is to support Ferret to the best of our abilities, within
the constraints of our budgets and other commitments. Since
Ferret is no-cost "freeware", and we are not funded
to provide support outside of our own Laboratory, we need to
enlist your help to make the effort successful. If Ferret users
will try to follow the recommendations below, community-wide
support will continue to work well.
- Consult the on-line documentation
- Ferret
User's Guide and its extensive index
- Consult PLOT+ graphics references
- Ferret Users Manual Chapter 6 shows how to call PPL commands from Ferret
- The PLOT+ Users Guide (Appendix B of the Ferret Users Guide)
- PLOT+ Enhancements Users Guide (Appendix C of the Ferret Users Guide)
- Consult Ferret demonstrations
and tutorials
- Consult release
notes and other documents
- (For questions or suggestions about the documentation itself,
email the Users Guide contact at
oar.pmel.ferret-ug@noaa.gov
)
- Consult the Frequently Asked
Questions
- Consult the searchable ferret_users
email archive to see if this question has been raised and
answered before
- Use the ferret_users
email list to post your question -- an active community of
highly skilled Ferret users is available to help answer your
questions
- Consider in advance how to make your question intelligible
to an audience unfamiliar with your work
- If you post a question and receive an answer in private
emails, please post a brief summary of the solution to ferret_users
so that others can see the solution to the question you raised
and so that the email archive contains the solution to your question
- If, while running Ferret, you encounter an outright crash
(that is, a core dump -- not just an error message after which
Ferret continues to be running), please notify us at
Ferret developers.
We need to know of these problems in order to fix them.
- If you need (as a last resort!) to direct
a question to the ferret developers directly, please be prepared
to
- Always tell us
- the operating system that you are running on (paste the output
of the Unix command "uname -a" into your message);
and
- the version of Ferret that you are running (paste the lines
Ferret emits as it starts up)
- Reduce your question to its simplest form
- if your problem occurs in the midst of a long and complex
script, try to reduce the script to its bare essence demonstrating
the problem
- if your problem requires specific data files to be demonstrated
- try to demonstrate it using data files that are routinely
distributed with Ferret (use "ls $FER_DSETS/data to see
which these data sets are); if you cannot, then
- try to demonstrate it with data sets that are small. This
may involve using Ferret to create reduced-sized data sets (typically
using the SAVE command)
- If we will need to reproduce the problem in order to debug
it, please be prepared to upload your scripts and data files
to our ftp site -- ftp.ferret.noaa.gov, directory incoming/ferret,
and let us know that you have done so by email
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