API: Allow setting "watch" on projects for groups of users
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Proposal
Our organization manages a large set of projects (several thousand). By corporate policy, all of our developers have commit privilege on all of these projects, but only a small number (generally between one and five) of developers are the primary maintainers of those packages (note: there is a difference between "package maintainers" and Gitlab's "maintainer" role). Some of these maintainers are responsible for large numbers (>200) packages.
We want to be able to specify that one or more centrally-managed users or groups of users are "watchers" for a package, which will ensure that they get notifications whenever a merge request, issue or other event occurs for the projects for which they are responsible.
We cannot just enable notifications for ALL members of a project, because this would mean that every developer in the company would receive updates for every package. This volume of mail would be impossible to sift through and would be even less effective than not receiving notifications.
Our present workaround is to have our users manually "watch" each repository for which they are responsible, but this is untenable for those who maintain hundreds of them.
We would like for there to be an API function that enables us to automate the process of adding users as watchers. Currently, the API only allows users to add themselves.