[flir]

Would be a nice feature though, wouldn't it... sort of git-blame-by-email.

"Hi, this PR is modifying a line of code that you submitted. You don't have to do anything, we're just notifying you in case you want to weigh in on the PR".

You could extend it into a general purpose "subscribe" mechanism - if someone raises a PR against this bock of code, please email me.

[kevincox]

Sounds like a great way to help share knowledge about a particular bit of code.

I can even imagine something like take the top 3 authors of code changed or removed by the PR and if they aren't already the author or reviewer CC them. That way you can pull in some people with context.

[bborud]

Yeah, I think this is something that has to be solved by the tooling. It isn't reasonable to expect people to do a git blame and remember to email everyone whose code you want to change.

That being said: I don't even expect people to notify me when changing code I have written at work. In fact, if people bothered me about code someone else should be perfectly capable of reviewing without me, I'd be a bit annoyed. I really don't need MORE interruptions.

The fact that a breaking change was introduced is really an orthogonal issue. It isn't a given that the original authors would catch the problem. Maybe in this case they would, but I don't think this is a given.

I have certainly experienced reviewing pull requests against code I have written only to let breaks slip by me. :-)

To me this sounds more like the code didn't have sufficient tests to catch the breakage. If I had written the code I would probably have looked at improving the tests after helping fix the breakage so at least it doesn't happen again. But of course, that's just speculation since I don't know what was broken and how.

[tracker1]

For that matter, simply attaching a @notify to the pull request (assuming it's a public repo) then the repository manager can notify you with the PR.

There are automation tools that do this already.