Besides the repository meisters, there are other FreeBSD project members and teams whom you will probably get to know in your role as a committer. Briefly, and by no means all-inclusively, these are:
<[email protected]>John is the manager of the SMPng Project, and has authority over the architectural design and implementation of the move to fine-grained kernel threading and locking. He is also the editor of the SMPng Architecture Document. If you are working on fine-grained SMP and locking, please coordinate with John. You can learn more about the SMPng Project on its home page: http://www.FreeBSD.org/smp/
<[email protected]>doceng is the group responsible for the documentation build infrastructure, approving new documentation committers, and ensuring that the FreeBSD website and documentation on the FTP site is up to date with respect to the CVS tree. It is not a conflict resolution body. The vast majority of documentation related discussion takes place on the FreeBSD documentation project mailing list. More details regarding the doceng team can be found in its charter. Committers interested in contributing to the documentation should familiarize themselves with the Documentation Project Primer.
<[email protected]>Ruslan is Mister mdoc(7). If you are writing a manual page and need some advice on the structure, or the markup, ask Ruslan.
<[email protected]>Bruce is the Style Police-Meister. When you do a commit that could have been done better, Bruce will be there to tell you. Be thankful that someone is. Bruce is also very knowledgeable on the various standards applicable to FreeBSD.
<[email protected]>, Doug White <[email protected]>, Robert Watson <[email protected]>, Ken Smith <[email protected]>, Hiroki Sato
<[email protected]>, Maxime Henrion <[email protected]>,
Bruce A. Mah <[email protected]>These are the members of the Release Engineering Team <[email protected]>. This team is responsible for
setting release deadlines and controlling the release process. During code freezes, the
release engineers have final authority on all changes to the system for whichever branch
is pending release status. If there is something you want merged from FreeBSD-CURRENT to
FreeBSD-STABLE (whatever values those may have at any given time), these are the people
to talk to about it.
Hiroki is also the keeper of the release documentation (src/release/doc/*). If you commit a change that you think is worthy of mention in the release notes, please make sure he knows about it. Better still, send him a patch with your suggested commentary.
<[email protected]>Colin is the FreeBSD Security
Officer and oversees the Security Officer Team <[email protected]>.
<[email protected]>If you need advice on obscure network internals or are not sure of some potential change to the networking subsystem you have in mind, Garrett is someone to talk to. Garrett is also very knowledgeable on the various standards applicable to FreeBSD.
cvs-committers is the entity that the version control system uses to send you all your commit messages. You should never send email directly to this list. You should only send replies to this list when they are short and are directly related to a commit.
There is a similar list, svn-committers, which has a similar purpose but is a normal list, i.e. you are free to send any suitable message to this list.
All committers are subscribed to -developers. This list was created to be a forum for the committers “community” issues. Examples are Core voting, announcements, etc.
The FreeBSD developers mailing list is for the exclusive use of FreeBSD committers. In order to develop FreeBSD, committers must have the ability to openly discuss matters that will be resolved before they are publicly announced. Frank discussions of work in progress are not suitable for open publication and may harm FreeBSD.
All FreeBSD committers are reminded to obey the copyright of the original author(s) of FreeBSD developers mailing list mail. Do not publish or forward messages from the FreeBSD developers mailing list outside the list membership without permission of all of the authors.
Copyright violators will be removed from the FreeBSD developers mailing list, resulting in a suspension of commit privileges. Repeated or flagrant violations may result in permanent revocation of commit privileges.
This list is not intended as a place for code reviews or a replacement for the FreeBSD architecture and design mailing list or the FreeBSD source code audit mailing list. In fact using it as such hurts the FreeBSD Project as it gives a sense of a closed list where general decisions affecting all of the FreeBSD using community are made without being “open”. Last, but not least never, never ever, email the FreeBSD developers mailing list and CC:/BCC: another FreeBSD list. Never, ever email another FreeBSD email list and CC:/BCC: the FreeBSD developers mailing list. Doing so can greatly diminish the benefits of this list.