Repo owner automatic notification after updating a pull request

Question

I've created a pull request on GitHub, been asked for changes by the repo owner, committed the changes and pushed them to the same branch.

Now I can see the updates in the pull request but I'm not sure if the repo owner have received any kind of automatic notification (e.g. email) about the update in the pull request. Should I trigger such a notification manually by adding a comment? something else?

Reading this, this and this doesn't answer the question either.

Answer 1

I'm not sure but I guess he didn't received a notification. However such GitHub behaviors often change over time with UI updates and new features... Anyway, it will be clearer for the repo owner, as for anybody else later reviewing what happened, if you'd explicitly notify him about the PR update. He might/should have asked you for those changes as a comment to your initial PR? Then answer you fulfilled his request with a new comment.

Answer 2

Since July 2016, your Pull Request not only will notify the repo owner, but also the code owners!

See "Introducing code owners":

While effective code review is essential to every successful project, it's not always clear who should review files—even with GitHub's reviewer suggestions.
Now repository maintainers can define exactly which people and teams need to review projects using code owners.
This new feature automatically requests reviews from the code owners when a pull request changes any owned files.

How code owners work

To specify code owners, create a file named CODEOWNERS in the repository's root directory (or in .github/ if you prefer) with the following format:

# Lines starting with '#' are comments.
# Each line is a file pattern followed by one or more owners.

# These owners will be the default owners for everything in the repo.
*       @defunkt

# Order is important. The last matching pattern has the most precedence.
# So if a pull request only touches javascript files, only these owners
# will be requested to review.
*.js    @octocat @github/js

# You can also use email addresses if you prefer.
docs/*  docs@example.com

This format may be familiar if you've used .gitattributes.

With that in place, code owners will automatically be requested for review whenever a pull request touches the files they own.