gitlab merge request. Who is the assignee?

Question

There is one particular point I don't understand for GitLab's merge requests.

I cloned a repository and made a feature branch. I worked something on it, committed it, and pushed the new branch to my GitLab repo.

With that I can make a merge request. When I do it says:

Assignee (and Assign to me)

Who should I assign it to? I mean, if I assign it to me, it is going to be me who "reviews" the change and approves it, so what is the point?

Or should I assign it to the repository administrator? Or to other member reviewers, so that they can check that and approve the merge?

What is the "Assign to me" option, and how does that makes sense?

Answer 1

There is documentation for that. It states:

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This person owns the merge request, but isn\xe2\x80\x99t responsible for reviewing it.

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Additionally, the documentation explains an exemplary merge request workflow:

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1. You would typically create the MR before working on your feature branch.
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2. Then you can use the Assign to me feature to indicate that you are the one currently working on implementing the features of the MR.
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3. After your work is done you can request a review following these guidelines.
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4. After finishing the review you can fall back to step 8 in the MR workflow.
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Answer 2

The people who are assigned to a merge request are the people who are responsible for it, not in a review kind of sense.
Usually it is the person who creates the pull request who counts as responsible for it i.e. has the responsibility of merging when all reviewers are happy and have approved or making changes according to the reviewers comments.

However, multiple people can have this responsibility as it is not always prudent for this to rest on a single person (what if the person goes on vacation?). Another case is if multiple developers have been working on the same feature and therefor have shared responsibility for the code in the merge request.

It is actually described in Gitlabs Documentation for Merge Request

TL;DR Multiple people can have responsibility / can be accountable for the merge request.