Automatic member inclusion for all projects forks in a group
Problem to solve
I'm exploring options for a GitLab CE configuration to be ideally suitable for use for university software development laboratory coursework.
Two requirements are:
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the lecturer (a gitlab user) has read access to all student code.
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a student should be able to @ mention the lecturer and lab helpers to ask for assistance, in commit comment boxes and line-by-line in one of their commits.
In the current setup, the onus is on a student to add their lecturer and all lab helpers (about 5) as members of their fork, before read access and @ mentions are possible.
Further details
Use case:
The workflow being used is:
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Lecturer creates a group for the class.
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Lecturer creates projects in that group, one per coursework.
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Students are added to the group.
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Students fork the projects.
Then when the student wants help from the lecturer and lab helpers, or the lecturer wants to look at in-progress code:
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Student adds the lecturer and lab helpers individually as a member of their forked project.
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Lecturer and lab helpers interact via commit comments and via @ mentions line-by-line in each commit.
Goal:
Instead, it be great if, when a student forks a project in the group, the lecturer and lab helper users immediately have read access and comment permissions on commits of all forked projects.
Benefits:
The 200+ students will no longer be obliged to manually add about 6 users to their fork, thus alleviating them from this project maintenance duty and the code feedback process can begin sooner.
Proposal
Two options are:
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A certain collection of users (namely the lecturer and lab helpers) are automatically added as members of every project forked from a particular group.
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An improvement over (1) would be if the lecturer and lab helpers were all combined into a group/subgroup of users, such that a student simply needs to fork and then mention @lab-helpers to get their attention for help.
What does success look like, and how can we measure that?
A student will not need to manually add a lecturer and lab helpers users as members to every coursework project they fork.