FreeBSD Cert

[matthew at FreeBSD.org]

On 27/05/2020 13:38, Brandon helsley wrote:
> What about port maintainership. Or port mentee? What Is it exactly. Good learning experience?

These are roles that people can have within the FreeBSD project.

Anyone can become a port maintainer -- which means you take over 
responsibility for keeping a port up to date, handling any problems or 
security vulnerabilities that may occur with it, and frequently 
reporting upstream on bugs or improvements discovered through the ports.

Port maintainers do not need to be ports committers -- although ports 
committers are all port maintainers.  If you become a port maintainer 
for a number of ports and make a sufficient contribution to the project, 
ultimately you will be punished with a commit bit.  That means you can 
commit changes to the Ports SVN (or Git, once they get the migration 
finished).

Now, as a new ports committer you are assigned one or two mentors who 
will teach you the ropes and review any commits you want to make for a 
matter of a few weeks up to several months.  Basically until they are 
satisfied that you're capable of being able to commit stuff on your own 
recognizance without making a complete pig's ear of it.

As the new committer, you have mentors: to the mentors, you are their 
mentee.

Yes, it is good experience to have.  Being involved in a big OSS project 
like FreeBSD stands out on a Curriculum Vitae and I've found it helps 
when job hunting, even if prospective employers aren't using FreeBSD much.

	Cheers,

	Matthew