[mikepurvis]

The strong coupling between repos and CI jobs is a huge obstacle— for a multi-repo codebase, you need to have triggers that are outside of "a new commit has been pushed".

The reporting is a big problem too— Jenkins has plugins which format and report on JUnit-style reports, including displaying images or other assets generated by tests.

Configuration. The config needing to be committed to the repo is an issue. For many use cases including ours, it's way better to have the CI configuration stored centrally somewhere, and deployed using Jenkins Job Builder (or the various other similar tools which exist for Jenkins).

Executor control. Jenkins lets you do things like put N slots on a buildslave and then have a job occupy M of them, as well as controlling what jobs can run where, and what the priority of different jobs is. This is critical for ensuring overall sanity and efficiency in the pipeline.

Jenkins isn't perfect, but it happens to be a better fit for our needs, and these four factors are all a big part of that.

[sytse]

For multiple projects you can use build triggers https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/ci/triggers/README.html

We're considering parsing JUnit style tests https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/22098

We think storing the configuration in the repository makes it easier to collaborate on it (new branch is tested in the new way, master in the old way). Can you share your use case for this?

You can specify how many jobs you want GitLab Runner to run. It can even spin up more VMs automatically if you want that. You can bind jobs to runners with labels and specific runners https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/runners/README.html

[mikepurvis]

Our use-case is perhaps a bit unique, but ROS has a federated development model, meaning literally hundreds of repos. See the following file which maps repos to package names and versions:

https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/blob/master/indigo/distribu...

These get generated into thousands of jobs: http://build.ros.org/view/All/

It would be totally unrealistic to rev job configurations by making commits into the individual repos (and in the public open source case, actually impossible— the maintainers of that community build infrastructure don't have write access to many of the repos— it's equivalent to a Debian distro using DSC files to grab tarballs).

[sytse]

Thanks for the use case and the links. I must admit I never saw a 14234 line yaml configuration file before.

The jobs page is not loading for me right now.

I think that in general developers and the build engineers should both have commit access. But I see your dilemma and think we need to have a conversation to see what the possibilities are.

[Snappy]

Great feedback, thanks!

This isn't exactly what you asked for, but we're seriously considering letting you "include" CI configuration from a central location.

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/20868