A project model for the FreeBSD Project
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5.2. Official Hats

The official hats in the FreeBSD Project are hats that are more or less formalised and mainly administrative roles. They have the authority and responsibility for their area. The following illustration shows the responsibility lines. After this follows a description of each hat, including who it is held by.

Figure 5-1. Overview of official hats



All boxes consist of groups of committers, except for the dotted boxes where the holders are not necessarily committers. The flattened circles are sub-projects and consist of both committers and non-committers of the main project.

5.2.1. Documentation project manager

The FreeBSD Documentation Project architect is responsible for defining and following up documentation goals for the committers in the Documentation project.

Hat held by: The DocEng team . The DocEng Charter.

5.2.2. CVSup Mirror Site Coordinator

The CVSup Mirror Site Coordinator coordinates all the CVSup Mirror Site Admins to ensure that they are distributing current versions of the software, that they have the capacity to update themselves when major updates are in progress, and making it easy for the general public to find their closest CVSup mirror.

Hat currently held by: The CVSup-master team .

5.2.3. Postmaster

The Postmaster is responsible for mail being correctly delivered to the committers' email address. He is also responsible for ensuring that the mailing lists work and should take measures against possible disruptions of mail such as having troll-, spam- and virus-filters.

Hat currently held by: the Postmaster Team .

5.2.4. Release Coordination

The responsibilities of the Release Engineering Team are

Further information about the development process is available in the release engineering section.

Hat held by: the Release Engineering team . The Release Engineering Charter.

5.2.5. Public Relations & Corporate Liaison

The Public Relations & Corporate Liaison's responsibilities are:



This hat is currently not occupied.

5.2.6. Security Officer

The Security Officer's main responsibility is to coordinate information exchange with others in the security community and in the FreeBSD project. The Security Officer is also responsible for taking action when security problems are reported and promoting proactive development behaviour when it comes to security.

Because of the fear that information about vulnerabilities may leak out to people with malicious intent before a patch is available, only the Security Officer, consisting of an officer, a deputy and two Core team members, receive sensitive information about security issues. However, to create or implement a patch, the Security Officer has the Security Officer Team to help do the work.

5.2.7. Source Repository Manager

The Source Repository Manager is the only one who is allowed to directly modify the repository without using the SVN tool. It is his/her responsibility to ensure that technical problems that arise in the repository are resolved quickly. The source repository manager has the authority to back out commits if this is necessary to resolve a CVS technical problem.

Hat held by: the Source Repository Manager .

5.2.8. Election Manager

The Election Manager is responsible for the Core election process. The manager is responsible for running and maintaining the election system, and is the final authority should minor unforeseen events happen in the election process. Major unforeseen events have to be discussed with the Core team

Hat held only during elections.

5.2.9. Web site Management

The Web site Management hat is responsible for coordinating the rollout of updated web pages on mirrors around the world, for the overall structure of the primary web site and the system it is running upon. The management needs to coordinate the content with The FreeBSD Documentation Project and acts as maintainer for the “www” tree.

Hat held by: the FreeBSD Webmasters .

5.2.10. Ports Manager

The Ports Manager acts as a liaison between The Ports Subproject and the core project, and all requests from the project should go to the ports manager.

Hat held by: the Ports Management Team . The Portmgr charter.

5.2.11. Standards

The Standards hat is responsible for ensuring that FreeBSD complies with the standards it is committed to , keeping up to date on the development of these standards and notifying FreeBSD developers of important changes that allows them to take a proactive role and decrease the time between a standards update and FreeBSD's compliancy.

Hat currently held by: Garrett Wollman .

5.2.12. Core Secretary

The Core Secretary's main responsibility is to write drafts to and publish the final Core Reports. The secretary also keeps the core agenda, thus ensuring that no balls are dropped unresolved.

Hat currently held by: Gábor Páli .

5.2.13. GNATS Administrator

The GNATS Administrator is responsible for ensuring that the maintenance database is in working order, that the entries are correctly categorised and that there are no invalid entries.

Hat currently held by: the Bugmeister Team .

5.2.14. Bugmeister

The Bugmeister is the person in charge of the problem report group.

Hat currently held by: the Bugmeister Team ,

5.2.15. Donations Liaison Officer

The task of the donations liaison officer is to match the developers with needs with people or organisations willing to make a donation. The Donations Liaison Charter is available here

Hat held by: the Donations Liaison Office .

5.2.16. Admin

(Also called “FreeBSD Cluster Admin”)

The admin team consists of the people responsible for administrating the computers that the project relies on for its distributed work and communication to be synchronised. It consists mainly of those people who have physical access to the servers.

Hat held by: the Admin team .

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