Specifying code review notifications

GitHub recently added support for specifying code ownership [1]. This is 
roughly equivalent to the system we already have with OWNERS files in 
various directories, and which we use to get people notified on PRs they 
care about. However it differs in a couple of ways (some positive and 
some negative):

* Some additional support in GitHub. We mostly don't care about this 
because we don't want to require that reviewers are listed in the 
*OWNERS file(s), but you get some additional icons (arguably misleading 
for our use case, since we aren't specifying any enforced ownership), 
and there might be more support in the future.

* Add entries go in a single file with precedence rules rather than one 
file per directory with a flat list of owners.

There are also some implementation differences:

* The GitHub system puts most implementation complexity in GH rather 
than in services that we (or, rather, tobie) run.

At this point we have several options:

1) Go all-in on the new feature. Make people edit the CODEOWNERS file to 
get notification for PRs. This has the advantage that we are doing the 
"GitHub approved thing". It has the disadvantage that the format of the 
file is IMO rather complex for our case where there are hundreds of 
directories all with different owners. I think we would have to invest 
in tooling to ensure that people didn't unintentionally edit the file in 
a way that clobbers other people's notification requests.

2) Use the new system, but with the input being OWNERS file from the new 
system, and a `wpt owners-update` tool that must be run to generate the 
CODEOWNERS file. This would avoid the problems with the new format, but 
would have the disadvantage of having to run a tool for each update. 
Travis could check the tool was run, but it would still require manual work.

3) Use the existing system. This would mean no changes, but also mean 
giving up the option to turn off the (parts of the) external bot we are 
using to recreate this feature.

Opinions?

I have an implementation of 2) at [2], which also includes a generated 
CODEOWNERS file [3] so you can get an idea of the complexity. I think 
that creating good tools to help with 1) would be harder, 
implementation-wise, but I don't know quite how hard.


[1] https://github.com/blog/2392-introducing-code-owners
[2] https://github.com/w3c/web-platform-tests/pull/6506
[3] 
https://github.com/w3c/web-platform-tests/blob/def1efdedfab188a4927cdd7e516491c01bd02ff/CODEOWNERS

Received on Monday, 10 July 2017 14:26:10 UTC