lightweight-prow-approve

lightweight-prow-approve

Lightweight (GitHub / GitLab runner-based) version of the Prow "LGTM" and "Approve" plugins

Goal

The goal of this plugin s to enable prow-style /lgtm and /approve workflows (as well as approving PR reviews) using GitHub Actions and GitHub Checks to block merging of PRs until a sufficient number of qualified reviewers have commented on the PR.

Why not just use CODEOWNERS?

Working on the Knative project, we attempted to migrate from Prow OWNERS files to the CODEOWNERS feature. Unfortunately, we found several problems, some more severe than others:

• CODEOWNERS is a top-level file, which requires top-level review to delegate permissions (minor difficulty)
• CODEOWNERS does not distinguish between PRs from maintainers and those from other contributors (major pain point)
  • In Knative, we want to keep the set of people who understand ("own") the code fairly small, without substantially getting in the way. We also want to ensure that each change has been looked at by at least two sets of eyes.
  • Unfortunately, CODEOWNERS enforces that the additional set of eyes must be a maintainer, even if the first set of eyes was from a maintainer. In practice, this means that non-maintainers can't do useful reviews, and increases the load on existing maintainers.