Enable self-assignment of issues via comments

[johannaojeling]

I was invited to take the post-merge contributor experience survey for open-telemetry/opentelemetry.io and have a piece of feedback applicable to more repositories, so I will post it here:

It would be useful if contributors with read-only access to a repository could assign themselves issues by commenting with a specific command. Just like it is possible to add labels via comments in open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector-contrib.

As a reference, in apache/beam, a comment with .take-issue will assign the issue to the user who commented.

[svrnm]

thanks for your feedback @johannaojeling, if I get this right this is a feedback for all repositories under OpenTelemetry, and not specific to this one or opentelemetry.io?

[johannaojeling]

Correct! Not specific to opentelemetry.io or this one, but in general for the OpenTelemetry repositories this would be a nice addition. I hope this was the right place to post feedback 🙂

[svrnm]

Yes, this is one place or you could raise an issue on the community repo.

While I see the value in your proposal, at the end this is something each SIG needs to decide for themselves, e.g. for opentelemetrydotio repo we have a policy to not assign issues to non members since we have a lot of passing by contributors, and this would mean we need to keep track of assignments. Maybe it's more of a recommendation or "best practice" if it makes sense in some of the repositories.

@open-telemetry/sig-contributor-experience-approvers @open-telemetry/sig-contributor-experience-maintainers what are your thoughts?

[mx-psi]

It makes sense as a best practice or a 'tool repos can use'. I would like to have a particular SIG in mind to work with on this though

[kaylareopelle]

I'd be interested in working on this with the Ruby repository. I have an active contributor who isn't an approver or maintainer yet who I could collaborate with for testing. We don't get a ton of traffic though, so it may be slow to get wider feedback.