There is no "special" access in GitHub, and no person as far as I know has such an access. I work at Microsoft, but GitHub side is very detached so I don't think there was any collaboration.
It would appear different.
Microsoft stealing projects into a private enterprise space is a different action than putting them back to public.
Stealing generates no emails, but restoring to public generates a lot of emails.
It would appear there's a backdoor system for them.
I've been an admin of an organisation that was moved into an enterprise org (with consent) and can confirm that this does not generate emails for the child org.
As I read it, there’s two different things happened. The foundation moved a repo they were given owner (or maybe admin) access into an enterprise GitHub account, which doesn’t generate a noisy trail of email.
The OP used a workaround of starting a new GitHub project a couple of project renames, and a project transfer - which did generate a flurry of notification emails.
(I’m surprised the “move into enterprise account t” action doesn’t at least notify all owners on the account. If it normally does, and these ones didn’t, that’s a super bad look for both the foundation and GitHub…)
What's the difference between "moving a repo...into an enterprise Github account" in the first paragraph and a "project transfer" in the second? I would have thought that "project transfer" is just another term for "moving a repo into a different account", so the only thing that seems different is going to enterprise versus going from. It seems kind of odd that email notifications wouldn't be the same in both cases.
I assume moving into an enterprise account is a single click (although I've never dione it, so :shrug:).
The workaround "project transfer" used/suggested for getting back _out_ of that enterprise account gets explained in the article like this:
1) Create a new GitHub organization, normally. For example, name it new-yourorgname
2) Rename your organization in GitHub Enterprise in the Settings to something like, dnf-yourorgname
3) Rename the organization from step 1 to your desired organization name. You want to complete this quickly after step 2 so no one takes your organization's name.
4) In the GitHub Enterprise dnf-yourorgname go into each repository's Settings and transfer the repo to the brand new yourorgname organization.
Not at all surprising that generates a flurry of emails, especially since in the authors case step 4 needed too be done 44 times, once for each repo in the org.
