Users allowed to always approve MR should not make them follower

We have many business owners through the team that should be able to approve MRs. The only way to do this is by adding them to the list of "users or groups who are allowed to approve every merge request".

The negative consequence of being in this "approve all" list, is that it makes all these users participators of the MRs. This semantically is only partially valid, as they actually did not participate.

Implications

  • Users or groups in approve-all-list should only in specific situations be added to the followers list, and get notified according to their notification preferences.
  • Because users always get added to the participate list, there will be a huge information overload of emails with each new MR.
  • The "participate" notification setting does not make any sense anymore, as they are participating from the beginning (while users actually did not participate)

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Proposed changes

  • Do not add approvals list as participants, only the one the MR is assigned to
  • Improve UX on approvals list when creating MR
  • Force devs to go through approvals list (make this a project setting)
  • Make users that are always able to approve more obvious stand out from the ones that are asked for approval on the MR
  • Future: make the MR approval a more solid workflow, to minimize the amount of communication needed
  • Future: add a button: Approve & Assign to next in approvers list

References to other MR approval issues