Many contributors don't assign a reviewer to their CLs, either because they don't think they need to or they don't know who would be a good reviewer.

FTR: Some contributors, me included, do not normally assign a reviewer because they are told not to do so:

Contribution Guidelines/Mail the change for review
Unless explicitly told otherwise, such as in the discussion leading up to sending in the change list, it's better not to specify a reviewer.

I agree with cznic: this feels like a documentation issue.

I don't assign a reviewer because i am told to do so. If we just change the guidelines I feel even I as a newbie contributor could figure out a possible reviewer.

I don't think changing the documentation will be enough to solve this problem.

Suppose we write something like

once you've uploaded your change, assign it to an appropriate reviewer.

Then what? I've contributed for like 2 years I don't really know who should I add as a reviewer on half of the changes I upload... I doubt a novice contributor will know better.

One possible solution could be to write a wiki page with a map package -> [list of suggested reviewers]. For example

net -> bradfitz
math/big -> gri

etc... but if we can compile such a list easily, then it could be a good idea to also include it in the codereview tool for automatic assignment like josharian suggests.

Related issue: #12364

Related to #12364, we should probably can create a list of reviewers by looking at who has approved reviews for the package in the past X months and blame the previous author of the lines. Then, pick 2 or 3 people and assign the CL to them.

Btw, none of this has to be done in the codereview program. We should probably use Gerrit hooks if we want to automate the assignment.

I should mention that we now have https://golang.org/s/owners which is a rough list of owners per package.

Is this being worked on actively?

My thinking is that having owners in spreadsheet is a maintenance burden. That doc has not beed updated in 1 year.

What if there could be some kind of package which can return suggested reviews based on the change, older changes along with reviewes? It could be a package using which we can build additions to Gerrit, git-codereview, and other tools. I am a new contributor to the project and have really hard times trying to figure out the reviewers.

cc @andybons

I created a CL a while ago to introduce an owners package, but I am too busy to keep working on it at this point. See https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/build/+/39390.

There is a plan to create an endpoint on dev.golang.org that can be queried both by humans and machines to find owners. @rakyll’s prior work on this will be helpful. Thanks!

@andybons I think this issue has been resolved by CL 121018 (though that CL doesn't mention it in the commit message), is that right? If so, we can close this issue.