(description from JRA-5229)

We have a very large user base (thousands of users).

It would be good if a group could contain a reference to other groups since this makes maintaining groups much less tedious.

For example:

Group A: User1, User2

Group B: User65, User 98

Group C: Group A, Group B, User 142

Group C is in a sense "dyanmic" so that if another user is added to Group A then Group C is effectively updated too (i.e. I'm not request the ability to have a "one time copy" of users into a new group).

From a mail thread on jira-users

> A useful feature, I think. I'm trying to enforce some sort of consistency
> in permissioning projects by using groups like $(key)-admin,
> $(key)-developer, $(key)-submitter. When only a small subset of people
> are allowed to submit a ticket, this works fine but when a project wants
> 'everyone' to be able to submit then I wind up not creating the -submitter
> group and permissioning jira-users instead. I'd like to be able to still
> create and permission the $(key)-submitter group for consistency but just
> make 'jira-users' a member... consistency in the groups makes scripting a
> lot easier too...