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Code Ownership and CODEOWNERS

Code ownership is the practice of designating specific individuals or teams as the primary maintainers or "owners" of certain parts of a codebase.

Identified benefits include the following:

  • Documented Responsibility: When a specific part of the code has a designated owner, it is clear who is responsible for its maintenance, updates, and quality.

  • Greater Expertise: Over time, code owners become experts in their designated areas, which can lead to faster debugging, better code quality, and more informed decisions about that part of the code. It also reduces the likelihood of bugs being introduced from outside the team.

  • More Meaningful Code Review: In large projects with many contributors, code ownership can help ensure that changes to a specific part of the code are reviewed by those who are most familiar with it.

GitHub's implementation of a code ownership system is built around a file, .github/CODEOWNERS, which is committed to the repository and managed as a normal file. You can learn more about it on GitHub.

The important ideas are:

  1. Code owners are automatically requested for review when someone opens a pull request that modifies code that they own.

  2. Code owners are not automatically requested to review draft pull requests.

  3. When you mark a draft pull request as ready for review, code owners are automatically notified.

  4. Approval from a code owner is required for merging a pull request affecting that section of the codebase.

  5. Changes to CODEOWNERS do not take effect until they are merged to main.

  6. Viewing the CODEOWNERS file in GitHub should provide debugging information.

As with everything else in this project, CODEOWNERS is subject to continual refinement and development. Please raise issues and suggest improvements where appropriate.

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