a friend of mine has created a Gnome GitLab account by using his GitHub account. I have given him access to my project as developer and we would like to work together on the project via merge requests. But roughly one hour after I gave him developer access to the project, he is thrown out again without any notification or action from our side. What is happening here?
Could someone give us a hint? What is the standard workflow of user collaboration on Gnome projects at the Gnome GitLab instance?
This is because your project is in the GNOME/ namespace, where permissions are synced every few hours with the DOAP file in your git repo (the gnome-commander.doap one). So if you really want (and need) him to have full maintainer access to the repository, you’ll need to add him in the DOAP file. But in that case he would be considered a maintainer of the project, on the same basis as you are.
But unless your friend wants to become a maintainer, but only contribute and help out on the project, then he shouldn’t need direct repository access as merge requests are there for that. Anyone can contribute a merge request without needing a developer/maintainer account.
Actually this isn’t the way it is supposed to work. If you want someone to have direct commit access, they need to get a GNOME Account. But this is indeed not required before someone starts contributing as one could use merge requests as @vanadiae mentioned.
That said, I don’t know if this info is inaccurate or if you discovered a loophole: people without a GNOME (LDAP) account shouldn’t have a maintainer permission on a repo.
