FreeBSD The Power to Serve

Charter for the Ports Management Team

The FreeBSD Ports Collection is a product intended first and foremost for the end-users of FreeBSD. The Ports Management Team (portmgr) is the group charged with overseeing its development. Its members are appointed by the FreeBSD Core Team (core).

The primary responsibility of the Team is to ensure that the FreeBSD Ports Developer community provides a ports collection that is functional, stable, up-to-date and full-featured. Its secondary responsibility is to coordinate among the committers and developers who work on it.

The Ports Management Team has the following specific responsibilities:

  • Assure the integrity of the Ports Collection by managing commits to the ports portion of the FreeBSD repository. This includes maintaining certain key files directly; running test builds of proposed large changes; and acting as arbiter over other commits.

  • Maintain the automated package building cluster, and make the resulting packages available for download by FreeBSD users.

  • Work with the FreeBSD Security team to ensure that security problems are identified and handled in a timely fashion.

  • Work with FreeBSD Ports and Documentation Committers to keep the relevant documentation up to date.

  • To the extent possible with a volunteer project, ensure that the legal rights of authors whose works are installed in the Ports Collection are respected.

  • Act as arbiter of first resort for disputes between FreeBSD community members such as maintainers and committers.

  • Manage commit access to the ports tree. All new committer approvals must be sent to admins@, and CC’d to core@; they must be PGP-signed.

  • Establish guidelines and policies governing the rights and responsibilities of Ports Committers and maintainers.

  • Help prioritize future directions for the overall Ports Collection.

In addition to its specific responsibilities, the Ports Management Team may take whatever actions it believes prudent to manage the ports collection responsibly.

Please see Ports Team Policies for a complete list of the current policies which have been adopted to help implement these goals.

This charter is under the control of the FreeBSD Core Team. It is valid until such time as it is modified or revoked by the Core Team; any changes to this charter must be approved by the Core Team.

Last modified on: December 29, 2023 by Benedict Reuschling