Add recommendations on GitHub branch protection rules and/or a ruleset recipe to template

[matt-graham]

Is Your Feature Request Related to a Problem? Please Describe

@zmek who attended the Festival of Digital Research and Scholarship workshop asked about recommendations for setting up rulesets to protect main branch with regards to the tutorial we used there.

Describe the Solution You'd Like

I think having some recommendations around a good basic default branch protection rule might be useful (possibly require status checks + pull requests before merging?) and/or creating a ruleset JSON file similar to those in the ruleset-recipes repository Zella linked to that people could import to set up a minimal set of rules.

Describe Alternatives You've Considered

No response

Additional Context

No response

[paddyroddy]

This might be possible via the GitHub CLI? I think we could detect a presence of CLI and a do a lot of extra automated things

[matt-graham]

I had a look yesterday and it doesn't look like its currently possible to add / edit rulesets only view them and similarly doesn't seem to be any relevant options under gh repo edit subcommand.

[paddyroddy]

I had a look yesterday and it doesn't look like its currently possible to add / edit rulesets only view them and similarly doesn't seem to be any relevant options under gh repo edit subcommand.

That's a shame. If nothing else, we can have JSON files that they could import.

[dstansby]

I'd say this is out of context for this project, as it's not Python package specific. Perhaps a separate UCL-ARC/github-tooling repo would work for this instaed?

[paddyroddy]

I'd say this is out of context for this project, as it's not Python package specific. Perhaps a separate UCL-ARC/github-tooling repo would work for this instaed?

I think something I noted from the workshops last week. People who were there knew Python, but weren't very familiar with everything else. So I do actually think there's merit in doing this.

[dstansby]

👍 agree there's merit, but still think it's outside the scope of this repo.

[dstansby]

I'm still on the side of this is out of scope (but maybe nice to have in a "git-tooling" or "github-tooling" repo?). Unless anyone disagrees, I'll close this issue in a couple of weeks

[samcunliffe]

Falls under the scope of a proposed extension to the UCL-ARC/coding-standards.

So I think this can actually be closed immediately. We can reopen if they don't end up adding anything there.