Allow adding groups to CODEOWNERS file
Problem to solve
Using a CODEOWNERS file allows you define the responsible individuals for specific files and folders, which is very important for large or monolithic repositories where specific people are responsible for different areas of the application. In very large repositories containing many projects, entire teams/groups may be responsible for a specific component rather than individuals.
The CODEOWNERS file currently only supports defining one or more individuals as code owner for a path. When this list of people directly corresponds to a group of users (that may be automatically populated from an LDAP server for example), this require double handling of changes in updating both the group and the code owners. The group should be the single source of truth so that the code owners file doesn't need to be manually updated all the time.
Further details
Groups are an important way of managing people, and may be synchronized from an LDAP server. GitLab should support groups consistently.
Proposal
We should allow specifying groups and subgroups in the codeowners file, so that the responsible users kept up to date based on the groups.
- rendering codeowners files in the repository browser
- assigning codeowners as approvers for merge requests GitLab Starter