## Original Summary from #38324 When creating a new repository with developer permissions on gitlab.com and ticking "Initialize repository with a README" the repo is not initialised. This is similar to https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/7583 but to me looks like a separate issue. ## Update I can still reproduce this in 15.3.3-ee, and I think it's as noted above: permissions are checked when doing the init, the user lacks permissions to push to protected branches (but *can* create a new repo), so GitLab doesn't init the repo. I would propose one of these solutions: 1. Explicitly allow this one push to a protected branch 2. "Initialize repository with a README" just becomes "Initialize repository" for these users and GitLab creates a root commit with `git commit --allow-empty -m "Root commit"` on their behalf, so they can clone the repo, branch, and then submit a MR that can be merged by people with the right permissions. But they didn't commit any content to a protected branch. 3. Remove this checkbox if you don't have the correct permissions given the default protected branch configuration (which then makes #7583 the only relevant issue)