Extend merge permissions for web projects
Currently, when members of other teams such as comms or applications want to publish a blog post or a new software release, they need someone from the web team (who have Maintainer permissions in tpo/web projects) to accept (merge) their Merge Request and also to push the latest CI build to production.
This process puts extra load on the web team, as their intervention is required on all web changes, even though some changes are quite trivial and should not require any manual review of MRs. Furthermore, it also puts extra load on the other teams as they need to follow-up at different moments of the publishing process to ensure someone from the web team steps in, otherwise the process is blocked.
I would like to propose to grant the members of projects under tpo/web with Developper permission, the power to accept Merge requests. This change would also allow them to trigger manual deployments to production. This way, we will avoid blocking on the web team for small, common and regular website updates. Of course, the web team will remain available to review all the other, more substantial or unusual website updates.
To make this change, under each project's Settings -> Repository -> Protected branches, for the main branch, the Allowed to merge option would change from Maintainers to Maintainers + Developpers. Allowed to push would remain set to Maintainers (so Developpers would still always need to submit MRs).
In order to ensure no one is granted permissions they should not have, we should, at the same time, verify that only core contributors of the Tor Project are assigned Developper permissions on these projects.