Bors missing approvals

For bors to be allowed to merge a batch of PRs the "Require pull request reviews before merging" check needs to be disabled in the GitHub branch protection rules.

The unfortunate side effect of disabling that check is that the GitHub UI stops showing which owners still need to approve the PR. This means authors have to figure that out manually which is cumbersome and time consuming.

If GitHub doesn't show us the missing approvals maybe bors can tell us instead. So what about adding a new command like:

bors missing approvals

which will comment on the PR which owners (teams or individuals) still need to give their approvals?

This could be implemented by taking some of the logic from the check_code_owner function.

This is a good idea. When I was implementing the CODEOWNERS functionality I considered adding in support to say "You need approvals from X, Y, Z to merge".

You could add functionality directly to the merge command to tell you what to do or a command like bors missing which will tell you what you are missing.

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I like the conciseness of bors missing. That command could even be generalized later with not only showing missing approvals but also missing pr_status checks.

I don't have experience with elixir nor do I know bors' code base well enough to judge how much effort it is to implement this.
@MarkRobinson do you have an estimate? And does adding a new command like this need to go through the RFC process?

I don't think it would be an outrageous amount of work to implement but it would require an RFC. I don't personally have enough time these days to do it myself.