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  <body>
    <title>Castor Support</title>

    <section title="Introduction">

      <p>
        Castor is an open-source product. This means that the source code is
        available at no charge and may be obtained using
        <a href="scm.xml">SVN</a> or may be <a href="download.xml">downloaded</a>
        via the Codehaus distribution server.
      </p>

      <p>
        Since castor is freely available, including the source code, there is no
        guaranteed level of support available. The online
        <a href="#Documentation">documentation</a> is the best place to start.
        If you have trouble or have more advanced questions not available in the
        online documentation, then please consider subscribing to one of the
        various available <a href="lists.xml">mailing lists</a>. In general, the lists 
        are the best place to ask questions about the product.
      </p>

      <p>
        We moved to <a href="http://www.codehaus.org">The Codehaus</a> in
        January 2005, and we greatly benefit from the infrastructure available
        at this site.  Due to this, we are in a position to offer you additional
        communication channels:
      </p>

      <ul>
        <li>
          Join us on the #castor IRC channel at irc.codehaus.org, where you'll
          mainly be able to talk to committers and fellow users/developers
          exchanging ideas and bouncing problems off each other. For those of
          you behind firewalls, please use the HTTP IRC deamon available at
          <url>http://irc.codehaus.org</url>.
        </li>
      </ul>

      <p>
        Please note, though, that for problems of any kind, you should still use
        one of the mailing list as your preferred way of communicating to us, as
        this enables other users to browse through old email at one of the
        available mailing list archives.
      </p>
    </section>

    <section title="Documentation">

      <p>
        The online documentation is available throughout the website. To get
        started simply click on the appropriate sections listed in the menu bar
        located to the left side of this page.
      </p>

      <p>
        If you can't find something in the documentation, try looking through
        the examples (as shipped as part of the source distribution).
      </p>

      <p>
        There are also numerous <a href="presentations.xml">presentations and
        articles</a> available about Castor to help get you started.
      </p>

    </section>

    <section title="Reporting Bugs and Bug Tracking">

      <p>
        If you find a bug, please file a report at Codehaus' issue management
        system (JIRA), available at
        <url>http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/CASTOR</url>
      </p>

      <p>
        Before submitting bugs or asking for features to be added/implemented,
        please read the
        <a href="http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html">Bugzilla Etiguette</a> and
        <a href="http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/bugwritinghelp.html">Bug Writing Guidelines</a> from Mozilla.org.
        as a general introduction to submitting such requests.
      </p>

    </section>

    <section title="Commercial Support">

      <p>
        Commercial support is not provided through this project at this time.
        Having said that, please note that there are a growing number of third
        party individuals/companies providing such support, as detailed
        <a href="professional-services.html">here</a>.
      </p>
    </section>

  </body>

</document>
