5.2. MAINTAINER on Makefiles

If a particular portion of the FreeBSD src/ distribution is being maintained by a person or group of persons, this is communicated through an entry in the src/MAINTAINERS file. Maintainers of ports within the Ports Collection express their maintainership to the world by adding a MAINTAINER line to the Makefile of the port in question:

MAINTAINER= email-addresses

Tip:

For other parts of the repository, or for sections not listed as having a maintainer, or when you are unsure who the active maintainer is, try looking at the recent commit history of the relevant parts of the source tree. It is quite often the case that a maintainer is not explicitly named, but the people who are actively working in a part of the source tree for, say, the last couple of years are interested in reviewing changes. Even if this is not specifically mentioned in the documentation or the source itself, asking for a review as a form of courtesy is a very reasonable thing to do.

The role of the maintainer is as follows:

All FreeBSD documents are available for download at http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/

Questions that are not answered by the documentation may be sent to <[email protected]>.
Send questions about this document to <[email protected]>.