I have two feature suggestions for the gitlab team:
A pipeline dashboard
Editable Names or notes for pipelines
Pipeline Dashboard
I’ve been wanting this one for a long time. I wish I could see all the projects I have access to and all their current pipelines. Currently, I’m an admin on our system so I find myself in admin > jobs to see how all our builds are doing (we have many projects with many dependent internal packages). If I weren’t admin, I’d be going to each project individually to check. It would be nice to know that 2 out of four projects have been deployed to devtest, for example, and also how close the others are to deploying based on our build stages (e.g. 1 is currently deploying, and the other is in automated testing).
Editable Names or Notes
This is as it sounds. Sometimes when a pipeline is triggered we want to know why, and if the change was from a dependency, the git commit comment that is currently used doesn’t reflect the update. Thus, I can see using the git comment as the default, but making it editable so I can change a pipeline name to “Manual pipeline to pickup change to package X”
I looked at the bug tracker. I found some relevant issues to see that at least one has already been (kinda) suggested before, but I really need to dig deeper to understand whether I should file a new enhancement request or just comment on an existing one. To be honest, I’m not going to do it. Just to get this far, I had to quickly sift through 110 separate issues to try to figure out in broad strokes whether it had been suggested (It would probably be the same for the other feature). I probably did a (very) bad job and so I should read a little more slowly. If I narrow that list to 5 enhancement proposals and have to read pages of comments to figure out the history of each, it’s honestly just too much of a time commitment. We’re probably talking at least 30-45 minutes before I start writing. (And if you look at this response, you will see I tend to be a little more verbose than most.)
Don’t get me wrong, I like gitlab and all, but it’s not my job. I’m willing to help out for the community etc but I won’t spend 30+ minutes to figure out how to suggest ways to improve their product. That process should be made frictionless for those that want to offer their opinion, IMHO. I’ve made the suggestion here. If they never look at it, fine. Oh well. At least I have an extra 30+ minutes with my wife and kid.
I’m not trying to grumpy about this, but it seems like quite a commitment to suggest things properly through the issue tracker. I’m further assuming (could be wrong) that if I do it wrong, I’ll be chastised for it, as is so common. Plus, the last thing I suggested was moved over to the EE version so I won’t even get to use it. It just seems like it’s a commitment without much possible upside.
