I actually kind of like the idea of a mentionbot, but the current
implementation has some problems. Rather than calculating who should be
mentioned based on TIL (touched it last), it would be nicer if this got closer
to solving Raymond's comment. If the domain expert could be notified when PRs
touch stuff they care about, that might be better. The mentionbot could then
be opt-in for folks who want to see more detail.
So mention-bot supports that, it just needs configured
Specifically, if you look at
https://github.com/facebook/mention-bot and note the
alwaysNotifyForPaths option. The problem is what happens to the experts file? If we end up managing both that file and the mentionbot confis separately then it leads to a bifurcation of where we track that info. At that point we have to either consider something to use to easily update one based on the other (e.g. pull in the experts file and use it to update the mentionbot config), or we come up with our own solution to the problem.
. I suspect though that it’s touched-it-last mentioning will get better once we get more people with commits under their actual name.
As I think Antoine pointed out, if people are doing fixes that don't require domain knowledge then that can skew the results (whether that will skew that much I don't know).
-Brett