1 About This Document

This file contains guidelines and advice for someone who is the maintainer of a GNU program on behalf of the GNU Project. Everyone is entitled to change and redistribute GNU software; you need not pay attention to this file to get permission. But if you want to maintain a version for widespread distribution, we suggest you follow these guidelines. If you are or would like to be a GNU maintainer, then it is essential to follow these guidelines.

In addition to this document, please read and follow the GNU Coding Standards (see Contents in GNU Coding Standards).

Please send corrections or suggestions for this document to bug-standards@gnu.org. If you make a suggestion, please include suggested new wording if you can. We prefer a context diff to the Texinfo source, but if that’s difficult for you, you can make a diff for some other version of this document, or propose it in any way that makes it clear. The source repository for this document can be found at http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/gnustandards.

If you want to receive diffs for every change to these GNU documents, join the mailing list gnustandards-commit@gnu.org, for instance via the web interface at http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnustandards-commit. Archives are also available there.

This document uses the gender-neutral third-person pronouns “person”, “per”, “pers” and “perself” which were promoted, and perhaps invented, by Marge Piercy in Woman on the Edge of Time. They are used just like “she”, “her”, “hers” and “herself”, except that they apply equally to males and females. For example, “Person placed per new program under the GNU GPL, to let the public benefit from per work, and to enable per to feel person has done the right thing.”

This release of the GNU Maintainer Information was last updated May 7, 2015.