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GitHub acknowledges autocrats with 'code owner' feature

Code host also seeking crowd comment on new T&Cs

GitHub's taken a leaf out of Google's Chromium book, introducing a feature that puts review requirements under the control of someone designated as a code owner.

Either individuals or teams can be code owners, responsible for a given slab of software and notified whenever someone makes a pull request.

Those who hold the honour/burden are simply listed in a file called – you'll never guess – CODEOWNERS in the root directory of a repository. GitHub describes the (pretty simple) syntax here.

# This is a comment.
# Each line is a file pattern followed by one or more owners.

# These owners will be the default owners for everything in the repo.
# Unless a later match takes precedence, @global-owner1 and @global-owner2
# will be requested for review when someone opens a pull request.
*       @global-owner1 @global-owner2

# Order is important; the last matching pattern takes the most precedence.
# When someone opens a pull request that only modifies JS files, only @js-owner
# and not the global owner(s) will be requested for a review.
*.js    @js-owner

# You can also use email addresses if you prefer. They'll be used to look up
# users just like we do for commit author emails.
docs/*  docs@example.com

GitHub's also asking for community input on an updated terms of service, discussed here, the most important of which cover private repositories and licences. ®

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