I’m involved in several open source project groups that are using GitLab CI quite extensively. Joining the Open Source Program to get extra CI minutes is interesting, but I’m unclear exactly how this will work wrt contributors.
Our projects use the forking workflow, so individual contributors never have direct access to any of the official project group repositories. Instead they fork the repo, and open merge requests to feed code back from their fork into the primary project repos. All merge requests are required to pass all CI jobs before merge requests are permitted to merge. Due to the forking workflow, the CI jobs are all running in the context of the user’s fork, not in the context of the main project group.
IOW, the only CI jobs that run in the context of the project are the post-merge CI jobs. Everything else ends up running in the contributors personal account. If the project joins the open source program, that give more minutes for the post merge CI jobs, but does not appear to help our contributors who are running CI jobs from forks.
Given that the project requires CI to complete before accepting a merge, if a contributor runs out of free CI minutes, they will be unable to contribute to the project, even if the project is part of the open source program. It feels like the open source program ought to be able to cover this forking workflow scenario somehow. Am I missing something in this respect ?