"Note" is used way too much, remove it.

"Only a single address..."

s/should be/is/

s/your/a/ to avoid use of "you" and "your".

I like emdashes, but this is simpler as two sentences.

"this entry. That merely..."

The maintainer is responsible for keeping the port up to date and making sure that it works correctly.

"section" seems superfluous there, can just be removed.

Grammar: This should be "... who the community looks to to take care of the port..." but then that's a (grammatically correct) double word, which sometimes gets flagged (I think igor might flag this for example) and is also somewhat confusing. Perhaps rewording to:

The community first looks to the maintainer to take care of the port, but the maintainer is not the only one who may do so.

would be good?

How about

A maintainer volunteers to keep a port in good working order. Maintainers have the primary responsibility for their ports, but not exclusive ownership. Ports exist for the benefit of the community and, in reality, belong to the community. What this means is that people other than the maintainer can make changes to a port. Large changes to the Ports Collection might require changes to many ports. The &os; Ports Management Team or members of other teams might modify ports to fix dependency issues or other problems, like a version bump for a shared library update. Some types of fixes have <quote>blanket approval</quote>, allowing any committer to fix those categories of problems on any port.

Perhaps add:

Changes to a port are not solely limited to the port maintainer. There are many others who may make changes to any port, such as the FreeBSD Ports Management Team or members of other teams. Other committers may also make changes to any port to fix dependency or other issues caused by changes they are making, such as updating a shared library. Additionally, there are some types of fixes that are approved for any committer to make to any port.

This might be a good place to document the blanket approvals if we plan to keep them forever.

s/Those/These/

s/approval/approvals/

This sentence and the last one in the paragraph above should be combined. The list of blanket approvals ought to be inside the note.

Mixed both paragraphs.

&a.portmgr; and do not require maintainer approval.

The list of exceptions should be a separate sentence, and not an aside.

Blanket approvals do not apply to some ports that are maintained by teams like ...
These teams use external repositories and can have work that would conflict with blanket approvals.

Blanket approval for most ports applies to these types of fixes:

Well, not conflict with the approvals, but with the type of changes that fall under blanket approvals. So maybe

...conflict with changes that would normally fall under blanket approval.</para>

s/Approval/approval/

The FDP Primer says to use American spellings unless the document used all British spellings originally, so s/modernising/modernizing/ .

I think I wrote modernizing, thought the z was making the word look ugly and replaced it with an s 0:-)

"of a port" is not needed.

Seems like this should be qualified now. The note we just changed says that many changes already have approval. Are those changes still supposed to be sent to the maintainer before commit?