This chapter documents various guidelines and policies in force for the FreeBSD source
tree.
If a particular portion of the FreeBSD distribution is being maintained by a person or
group of persons, they can communicate this fact to the world by adding a
MAINTAINER= email-addresses
line to the Makefiles covering this portion of the source
tree.
The semantics of this are as follows:
The maintainer owns and is responsible for that code. This means that he is
responsible for fixing bugs and answering problem reports pertaining to that piece of the
code, and in the case of contributed software, for tracking new versions, as
appropriate.
Changes to directories which have a maintainer defined shall be sent to the maintainer
for review before being committed. Only if the maintainer does not respond for an
unacceptable period of time, to several emails, will it be acceptable to commit changes
without review by the maintainer. However, it is suggested that you try to have the
changes reviewed by someone else if at all possible.
It is of course not acceptable to add a person or group as maintainer unless they
agree to assume this duty. On the other hand it does not have to be a committer and it
can easily be a group of people.
