Attempt to understand inheritance problems in Source Code Management

Goal

We are regularly confronted with requests to fix issues that relate to inheritance. We often resort to point solutions for the specific issue. This is an attempt to look for patterns in these requests and patterns in potential shortcomings in the product. The ideal outcome would be an abstract (documented) idea how things should generally behave across the different features.

Copying from &9733 (comment 1251955623) for context:

We have several issues around the subject of inheritance

• Inherited members of Code Owners subgroups cann... (#281029 - closed)
• Acceptable CODEOWNERS Groups Should Inherit fro... (#288851)
• Inherit codeowners from groups added as members. (#254800)
• Inherit previous CODEOWNERS rules instead of re... (#221298)
• Allow Projects to inherit Common settings from ... (#28593)

We should clearly document how the inheritance rules function today as part of Technical design doc for Code Owners (#219916 - closed) and then decide if we can implement a single enhancement that will address multiple issues.

Approach

1. collect issues by linking them to this issue (even closed ones may be helpful)
2. review issues
3. document what we learned