5.5. MAINTAINER
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5.5. MAINTAINER

Set your mail-address here. Please. :-)

Only a single address without the comment part is allowed as a MAINTAINER value. The format used is user@hostname.domain. Please do not include any descriptive text such as a real name in this entry. That merely confuses the Ports infrastructure and most tools using it.

The maintainer is responsible for keeping the port up to date and making sure that it works correctly. For a detailed description of the responsibilities of a port maintainer, refer to The challenge for port maintainers.

Note:

A maintainer volunteers to keep a port in good working order. Maintainers have the primary responsibility for their ports, but not exclusive ownership. Ports exist for the benefit of the community and, in reality, belong to the community. What this means is that people other than the maintainer can make changes to a port. Large changes to the Ports Collection might require changes to many ports. The FreeBSD Ports Management Team or members of other teams might modify ports to fix dependency issues or other problems, like a version bump for a shared library update.

Some types of fixes have “blanket approval” from the Ports Management Team , allowing any committer to fix those categories of problems on any port. These fixes do not need approval from the maintainer. Blanket approval does not apply to ports that are maintained by teams like , , , or . These teams use external repositories and can have work that would conflict with changes that would normally fall under blanket approval.

Blanket approval for most ports applies to these types of fixes:

  • Most infrastructure changes to a port (that is, modernizing, but not changing the functionality). For example, converting to staging, USE_GMAKE to USES=gmake, the new LIB_DEPENDS format...

  • Trivial and tested build and runtime fixes.

Other changes to the port will be sent to the maintainer for review and approval before being committed. If the maintainer does not respond to an update request after two weeks (excluding major public holidays), then that is considered a maintainer timeout, and the update may be made without explicit maintainer approval. If the maintainer does not respond within three months, or if there have been three consecutive timeouts, then that maintainer is considered absent without leave, and can be replaced as the maintainer of the particular port in question. Exceptions to this are anything maintained by the Ports Management Team , or the Security Officer Team . No unauthorized commits may ever be made to ports maintained by those groups.

We reserve the right to modify the maintainer's submission to better match existing policies and style of the Ports Collection without explicit blessing from the submitter or the maintainer. Also, large infrastructural changes can result in a port being modified without the maintainer's consent. These kinds of changes will never affect the port's functionality.

The Ports Management Team reserves the right to revoke or override anyone's maintainership for any reason, and the Security Officer Team reserves the right to revoke or override maintainership for security reasons.

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