Provide option for Forked projects to default to an internal merge
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Release notes
Problem to solve
We would like to request a feature/enhancement that revolves around the current Forking process for self managed instances.
The current behavior of a Merge request when its created, for a Forked project, is to automatically point back to the originating project, not the fork. This is fine under normal circumstances, but when using multiple instances of GitLab on different networks, this is not the ideal behavior.
In a scenario where you have 2 instances of GitLab on different networks, Instance A and Instance B. Instance B is going to have a copy of all the projects from Instance A in a read-only group structure. As projects on instance A are updated, they are going to overwrite the corresponding project on instance B. If changes are needed to a project on Instance B, and the project has originated from Instance A, the Project is Forked into a read/write area on instance B, but it maintains the fork back to the read only project so it can consume any updates that are brought in from instance A.
This means that when we create any MR's on this forked project its going to try and create a MR that points back to the read only project.
If the Merge Request Default Target project could be configured at the instance/group/project level this would save on some time and confusion for this scenario.
As a separate but related issue, when creating an issue on a normal, non-forked project, you have the option to create a MR directly from an issue, and it also creates the corresponding branch in the project.
When creating an issue in a forked project, the option to create a merge request from the issue has been removed, i assume that this is due to it being a fork and pointing back to another project as its source. starting from the scenario above; if a project is a fork and it has been configured to point to itself as the default MR target, and not back to the source project, then it would make sense for this button to be re-enabled.
Proposal
Add an option that would allow for the Forked project to behave like a non-forked project (allow for MR to be generated from an Issue and allow for the default target branch to be the default branch in the forked project rather than the project that was forked.
Intended users
This feature would be used by: