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Comment by jacobparker | Hacker News Reader

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Have you seen their CODEOWNERS feature? https://help.github.com/articles/about-codeowners/ there is a check box to enforce reviews by owners.

Chrome/Google have something like that but more flexible (e.g. you can have nested OWNERS files) called OWNERS https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/docs...

There's a more general/kinda crazy system in Gerrit (by Google) that let's you write custom rules in Prolog (which helps for solving for a minimal set of reviewers that could approve a given PR.) I'm not sure if it gets much use but its a neat thought for sure: https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/Documentation/prolog-... (which links to this email explaining why: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/repo-discuss/wJxTGhlHZMM/Tal... )

CODEOWNERS is a good start, but it only works for the main branch, which means that it doesn't really work well with the Git Flow (https://leanpub.com/git-flow/read). Keeping a different CODEOWNERS file in each branch would be suboptimal, because that means cross-branch merges become a touch nasty. Perhaps if CODEOWNERS was extended to allow matching against rules that also include the branch to be merged into? Alternatively, if that might break existing CODEOWNERS files, doing the same in a MAINTAINERS file might be a viable solution instead.

I think the constraint-solver method in Gerrit is pretty neat, although I could see integrating that into GitHub and devising a non-painful UI for that as a major challenge. However, if they managed to do it, that would be an insanely powerful feature to have, especially for larger or more complex projects.

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