Direct Transfer - Allow two or more Placeholder users be assigned to the same user
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Context
My employer works with 3rd party companies to contract developers to work in dev teams. We also have college trainees who can work for only 2 years. When the trainee's contract expires, some will be contracted again through the 3rd parties. It also happens that an employee of a 3rd party moves to another 3rd party company to work with us (often they open their own company).
When this happens, Human Resources creates a new employee record, which automatically creates a new LDAP user with a new email and a new company-uid. In GitLab, we use the company-uid as username, name, email, etc.
I am now migrating from old GitLab instances (we used to have 4) to a new one, to unify all of them and to buy a license for this instance.
Issue
Since when contracts expire and new users are created, the Instance Admins of the old instances didn't think to just change the username/email of the registered users with the new info. By not doing that, some users have 3 GitLab accounts: 2 old and blocked, and the other as the current account.
Since I am migrating the Groups and Repositories by Direct Transfer, and have upgraded the Instance to 17.7.0 and 17.7.1, I was able to use the Placeholder feature. However, I thought I would be able to assign those two old accounts to the actual account in my instance, to integrate all references to the old accounts to the new one, and also to not have 2 placeholder accounts that haven't been reassigned.
Question
Is it possible to implement a feature, behind a feature flag, that would be able to assign two or more accounts to the same assignee?
Version
GitLab Self-Host v17.7.1