June 1996.
If a particular portion of the FreeBSD distribution is being maintained by a person or group of persons, they can communicate this fact to the world by adding a
MAINTAINER= email-addresses
line to the makefiles covering this portion of the source tree.
The semantics of this are as follows:
The maintainer owns and is responsible for that code. This means that he is responsible for fixing bugs and answer problem reports pertaining to that piece of the code, and in the case of contributed software, for tracking new versions, as appropriate.
Changes to directories which have a maintainer defined shall be sent to the maintainer for review before being committed. Only if the maintainer does not respond for an unacceptable period of time, to several emails, will it be acceptable to commit changes without review by the maintainer. However, it is suggested that you try and have the changes reviewed by someone else if at all possible.
It is of course not acceptable to add a person or group as maintainer unless they agree to assume this duty. On the other hand it doesn't have to be a committer and it can easily be a group of people.