---
title: "Policies of the Ports Management Team: Maintainers and Committers"
sidenav: about
---

= Policies of the Ports Management Team: Maintainers and Committers

These are the time periods that apply to maintainer and committer responses to issues brought to their attention via email.

[[pr_timeout]]
== Problem Report (PR) Timeouts

The time limit for a maintainer to respond to a PR is two weeks. After that period, if it is a minor change, any ports committer can commit the change. If it is a major change (e.g., would require a regression run), please contact portmgr first.

We have an add-on to the Problem Reports database known as the auto-assigner, which attempts to automatically notify maintainers of PRs; however, it depends on the Summary containing category/portname. In general, various people attempt to catch and fix cases where it does not work, but you should not assume so. Therefore, please check to see whether or not the maintainer knows about the PR before declaring a timeout. You can generally tell this from the Audit-Trail and Cc: lines in the PR.

[[maintainer_reset]]
== Maintainer Reset

A maintainer who does not respond to any port issues for 3 months may be reset by any ports committer. If you are a committer and concerned about whether you are doing the right thing, please contact portmgr.

This period may be shortened by portmgr if the email address returns with a hard bounce. In this case, it is probably desirable to reset all the maintainer's ports and check the status of any PRs.

[[commit_privileges]]
== Commit Privileges

Ports committers who are not active for one year will lose commit privileges. portmgr will contact the committer by email before invoking this limit.
