Add initial CODEOWNERS

[ddbeck]

The new governance doc (#3668) calls for a CODEOWNERS file:

The owners are also listed as top-level owners in GitHub’s code owner file.

This PR adds this, though we might might want to fill it out a bit more, unless we want every PR to request the owners' reviews

[Elchi3]

Thanks for this PR, I forgot to follow-up on this. (I thought it was a good idea at the time, but I haven't actually looked into this in much details. We should totally figure this out, or, if we can't, remove these references from the gov doc).

unless we want every PR to request the owners' reviews

We certainly don't want this. Not all owners/peers are doing reviews all the time. I don't think auto assigning reviews is generally useful.

I'm reading https://help.github.com/en/articles/about-code-owners. So, there isn't a way to disable automatic review assignment if we introduce a codeowner file? Or does this work by being more clever with the rules?

So far I could imagine these two rules for auto review assignment:

• For webextensions/ assign Irene as a reviewer.
• all files that aren't .json assign me as a reviewer.

I'd like to somehow state (in an owners file, I thought) that we have experts like Rachel for css/, but I'm not sure I want to auto-assign reviews to her, for example. As said in the governance PR, being a peer should not force you to do work.

Does all this make some sense? Or am I misunderstanding this whole codeowners concept? :)

[ddbeck]

So, there isn't a way to disable automatic review assignment if we introduce a codeowner file?

I don't think we have to have a top-level, default CODEOWNERS entry (i.e., an initial * fallback). In other words, we can have some PRs which do not automatically have a reviewer requested. Also, even if there is an owner match, the review request is not (by default) obligatory—we can merge without a requested owner's review (that's a separate repo setting).

So far I could imagine these two rules for auto review assignment:

* For webextensions/ assign Irene as a reviewer.
* all files that aren't .json assign me as a reviewer.

I think we can do this with a CODEOWNERS file without having to request a review for every PR. But we would probably want to drop the text from the governance file pointing toward the CODEOWNERS file (or just it as a document—putting those owners' names in as comments).

[queengooborg]

Basically, what we’re looking for is the following:

webextensions/ @irenesmith
!*.json @Elchi3

Based upon what I’ve been reading, CODEOWNERS is a similar syntax to .gitignore files, so the ! should work, theoretically. It seems to choose the last match, so any non-JSON files in webextensions/ will not be assigned to Irene and only assigned to Elchi3.

[ddbeck]

OK, I've updated the CODEOWNERS file to reflect @vinyldarkscratch's suggested syntax and added a comment referring to the governance doc. Rather than being a circular reference, I dropped the code owners line from the governance doc.

[queengooborg]

Looks perfect!

[Elchi3]

Thank you! 👍 Curious to see how this works out in practice.

[queengooborg]

Hmm, it looks like it may not be functioning as expected. I reviewed a PR that altered the test files (JS files), and didn’t automatically add @Elchi3 for review. More research may be needed.

[ddbeck]

Making a note here: PR #3933 is addressing this.