[python-committers] mention-bot is dead, long live the (misnamed) CODEOWNERS file!

Brett Cannon brett at python.org
Tue Aug 1 16:59:51 EDT 2017


For those of you who have not noticed, mention-bot is no more. We were
using the free instance that Facebook provided, but it seems to have fallen
over and it doesn't look like it's going to get fixed soon (
https://github.com/facebook/mention-bot/issues/230).

But while mention-bot was down, GitHub launched a new feature that serves a
related purpose. While mention-bot tried to guess who should review a PR
based on who has committed (which led some of us to get mentioned a lot
simply from having touched a bunch of files), that didn't guarantee people
got listed as a reviewer when they specifically wanted to be (e.g.
Christian wanting to know about PRs touching our hashing or SSL code).

But GitHub launched CODEOWNERS to cover that latter case (
https://help.github.com/articles/about-codeowners/ ). Now the filename is
misleading since it doesn't necessarily mean someone owns the code (there's
an option to make it feel like that, but we will never flip that on), but
basically what the file does is let us specify who should automatically be
added as a review of a pull request when files changed by the PR match one
of the rules in CODEOWNERS. We have now created the file thanks to Mariatta
(https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/master/.github/CODEOWNERS) and
started with what we had in our .mention-bot file (which was just some
rules for Christian). But if there are any files you want to automatically
be listed as a reviewer on automatically, then please add an appropriate
rule to that file (remember that being listed as a reviewer doesn't require
that you review else you block a PR from being merged, so don't view it as
some major commitment).

Now to start we can specify individual people. But if there end up being
groups of people who want to be added to reviews on certain topics (e.g.
Eric, Nick, and myself for importlib stuff), then we can create sub-teams
on GitHub of the Python Core team and then that team can be listed for the
rule. To create a team just tell me who is on the team -- all of whom will
be made admins so teams are self-organized post-creation -- and what the
team name should be (e.g. importlib-team). Then you can reference the team
by e.g. @python/importlib-team (I think team names, even when nested, are
not nested when mentioning so we will probably want to have a "-team"
suffix for all teams to make it clear it's a subteam and not to clash with
higher-level teams like @python/asyncio or @python/typing).
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