Are Codeowners reviewers added as standard approvers or default approvers?

Question

Infra: Bitbucket Cloud, Common Library, different teams own specific folders/files.

Old Repo setup: Reviewer Groups, minimum 2 approvals for merging

New: 5 teams within teams.yaml, 30+ files within CODEOWNERS.

Questions: If a PR say modifies files from all 5 teams, are the reviewers from those teams added as standard or default reviewers whose approvals can allow merging? Would approvals from these contributors mentioned in the teams.yaml fill up the minimum approvals guards set by reviewer groups? Is there a way to clearly set this up as standard vs default?

Problem: These situations are not clearly called out in the docs; guideline on when and when not to use this feature (if it breaks reviewer groups controls)

Syahrul · Answer

G'day, @John Keippel III

Thanks for sharing your feedback! I believe we do have an existing feature request on this that I highly suggest you Vote and Watch to keep you updated if we have any in the future at:

BCLOUD-23212

I hope this helps.

Regards,
Syahrul

John Keippel III · Answer

I guess this makes me wonder how useful CODEOWNERS really is then? I mean, the meta rule makes it seem like you should be able to protect .bitbucket/ from being modified to remove the rules, but that’s not really the case? That rule would just ‘suggest’ that the team maintaining the rule should review, but there’s nothing stopping the author from either removing that reviewer in the PR or just leaving it there and getting approval from someone else in default reviewers and then merging.

Dows CODEOWNERS really not have any way to hook into merge restrictions? Ideallly ‘you need X approvals from default reviewers PLUS you altered /infrastructure and so you’ll also need an approval from the ops team’. Because that’s the only way CODEOWNERS is at all useful to me I guess.

Syahrul · Answer

G'day, @Vikram Menon

Welcome to the community!

I'm not entirely sure I understand your questions. If I've misunderstood, please feel free to correct me.

Regarding Codeowners, they will only provide suggestions when a pull request (PR) is created. They are not automatically added as reviewers, unlike default reviewers who are automatically assigned when a PR is created.

To address the question of who can approve a PR for merging: any reviewer assigned to the PR can approve it. If the PR meets the branch permission criteria, it will be allowed to merge.

I hope this helps

Regards,
Syahrul