Allow inheriting higher level owner

[mathias-kende]

It is sometime useful to have teams able to approve changes everywhere in a repository (e.g. teams performing large scale refactoring, etc.). As far as I understand the codeowners-plus documentation there is no easy way to support that for now (basically that team would need to be listed as an OR in every single rule in every .codeowners file in the repo, and the team would end up being added to all the PR).

Could some option be added to support this workflow?

Maybe with a new option in the codeowners.toml file that would make it so that any rule of a higher level .codeowners that matches files covered by a lower level .codeowners would be implicit OR rules. These implicit owners would not be added to the PR, not even be notified. But if they approve the PR their ownership would be sufficient to validate the review.

[BakerNet]

What about just having a "super approvers" setting that is a list of users/teams whose approval would allow bypassing other owner rules - so instead of having lower-level .codeowners rules be implicitly OR'ed, you would instead have a static list of explicit "super approvers"

Or do you see a need for this ability to be split across paths in the repository?

[mathias-kende]

Super approvers would definitely be a good start yes, and enough for my current use cases. But that would not scale as well to a large organizations where indeed this might need to be split by folders (or be refined the further down you go).

By the way, an extension to what I wrote above could be that notify only rules (non owner reviewer) could still be pinged, even for files covered by lower level .codeowners (as that is the sole intent of these rules).

[BakerNet]

I'll put some thought into this when I have some free time.

But if you want a Super approvers solution for your use case in the meantime, you can use the admin_bypass feature https://github.com/multimediallc/codeowners-plus?tab=readme-ov-file#admin-bypass to give a set of users the ability to bypass required reviews.

One suggestion I'm not fully understanding:

By the way, an extension to what I wrote above could be that notify only rules (non owner reviewer) could still be pinged, even for files covered by lower level .codeowners (as that is the sole intent of these rules).