[RFC] Proposed Changes to Clang's Code Ownership

[AaronBallman]

@clattner

These are great questions, could we move this discussion to the LLVM Project category so folks beyond the clang subproject are more likely to participate?

Agreed! I started a thread at: About Community Code Ownership

[clattner]

nice, thx!

[philnik]

While you’re at it, it would be great if you could add Herald rules to automatically assign the correct reviewers to patches. Maybe even a better option would be to create projects which are actually owning the code. These projects could be automatically set as reviewers. That would allow anybody to subscribe to the parts they are interested in and also show who is allowed to approve a patch.
For example, for libc++ we have a libc++ project on phab which automatically gets assigned to any patch that touches libc++ code. Anybody who is interested in the libc++ development can add themselves as a watcher and the members are allowed to accept patches for libc++.
This allows us to have Louis as the official code owner for any decision making, but have quite a few other people that can approve normal patches.

I’m not sure if this would be a good way to handle clang code reviews, but it works very well for libc++.

[AaronBallman]

@philnik

Maybe even a better option would be to create projects which are actually owning the code. These projects could be automatically set as reviewers.

This is a really good idea! We did this with the clang language wg as well, and it’s worked okay so far (not gotten a ton of extra review from it, but it’s new so it might take a while for folks to take advantage of it).

I’d be wary of signing up all the code reviewers for Herald rules automatically; I think they should opt into whatever mechanism works best for them to track reviews (for some folks, the Herald rules would basically be “touches any part of the project” so it doesn’t work for all roles). But I think we should strongly encourage some form of automation where possible.

[AaronBallman]

Thank you for all the feedback! I’m seeing no opposition to the proposal, so I think this RFC has been accepted. I’ll leave the review open at ⚙ D132550 Changes to code ownership in clang and clang-tidy for a little while longer in case people have comments about the changes I made to the layout of that file, but I expect to commit it early next week. If you have concerns, now is a great time to voice them.

[clattner]

+1, thanks Aaron

[AaronBallman]

I’ve committed the changes in 3c604e9f15606fa395b088ca341a232ffda2bb7d, thank you to everyone for the feedback!

[nickdesaulniers]

Overdue