[PM-36047] Set an owner for the CODEOWNERS file

[coltonhurst]

🎟️ Tracking

https://bitwarden.atlassian.net/browse/PM-36047

📔 Objective

For some existing repositories, there is no owner for the CODEOWNERS file itself. This presents a couple of concerns that were discussed in the recent April 28 Tech Leads meeting. The main initial concern is that a team’s ownership can change without them knowing or being approvers of the change.

This could be fixed in multiple ways, but two were discussed:

1. CODEOWNERS changes require approval from all teams whose ownership is changing. This is the better solution, but GitHub doesn’t seem to provide this capability. Something custom would have to be created, so this option is more effort.
2. CODEOWNERS changes require approval from the Tech Lead group. This is a less ideal solution compared to #1, but it should help provide more approval from the tech lead owners of files, and give them notifications on any changes.

Notably, for this template repository, this change would remove architecture as the default owners for new repositories. This was not discussed in the meeting, so opinions on this are definitely welcome (in addition to this change overall).

[github-actions]

Checkmarx One – Scan Summary & Details – 822bc061-b3b7-4311-8976-51cf1c449d07

Great job! No new security vulnerabilities introduced in this pull request

[github-actions]

🤖 Bitwarden Claude Code Review

Overall Assessment: APPROVE

This PR adds a single CODEOWNERS rule that designates @bitwarden/tech-leads as the required reviewer for changes to .github/CODEOWNERS itself. The change implements option 2 from the April 28 Tech Leads meeting, addressing the concern that a team's ownership can be modified without their awareness or approval. The placement under the default owners and ahead of more specific path-based rules respects the file's documented "specificity" ordering, and GitHub's last-match-wins evaluation ensures the new rule takes effect correctly. No security, correctness, or breaking-change concerns were identified.

Code Review Details

No findings.

[theMickster]

Upon closer inspection, we should not make the change in the template repo because that indicates that all current repos should be in alignment with the change and all future repos will have these owners. That's not necessarily the case organization wide so we should refrain for now.

[coltonhurst]

Upon closer inspection, we should not make the change in the template repo because that indicates that all current repos should be in alignment with the change and all future repos will have these owners. That's not necessarily the case organization wide so we should refrain for now.

Sounds good, closing this. PR's have been created for clients, server, and sdk-internal.