Non-maintainers can't assign reviewers to their PRs

[calebschoepp]

With the recent governance change non-maintainers have lost the ability to assign reviewers to their PRs. I've found this to be unergonomic because now I have to revert to pinging people in comments to get them to review my code.

[michelleN]

Would it be helpful to automatically assign reviewers to PRs to resolve this issue? or do you want to be able to assign specific reviewers?

[calebschoepp]

I think auto assigned reviewers is helpful sometimes. But, I can also think of a lot of scenarios where I have a specific person or two in mind and would just want to be able to assign them.

Two questions I think we should ask ourselves:

• Is auto assigned reviewers actually going to be helpful or is it just going to be spammy?
  • Personally I lean towards feeling it is spammy.
• What is the risk vector of letting anyone assign reviewers?
  • The obvious one is people getting spammed with review requests — but, I would posit that Spin isn't a big enough project for that to be a problem. We can always remove this permission in the future.

[lann]

Perhaps we could have a "contributors" group with triage permissions and add anyone who has made "signficant contributions" to the project? Triage is pretty limited and would only be a problem if applied to someone malicious or spammy.

[lann]

It appears that you cannot have teams contain members that aren't also org members but we could still maintain a flat list of triagers in the repo.

[michelleN]

Spin meeting (6/2): Discussed adding CODEOWNERS file. Growing consensus around that. Since we have lots of maintainers, would be nice to have reviewers split by section of code. Also would like CODEOWNERS to dictate auto-reviewers but not require that subset of people to have to be the ones to approve.