The split between tag and branch pipelines seems like intentional obfuscation with no upsides (you can't build non-latest commit from a branch, and when you use a tag to select the commit, GitLab intentionally hides all branch-related info, and skips jobs that depend on branch names).
"CI components" are not really components, but copy-paste of YAML into global state. Merging of jobs merges objects but not arrays, making composition unreliable or impossible.
The `steps` are still unstable/experimental. Composing multiple steps either is a mess of appending lines of bash, or you have go all the way in the other direction and build layered Docker images.
I could go on all day. Programming in YAML is annoying, and GitLab is full of issues that make it even clunkier than it needs to be.
My ready example of a GitLab pain point is parallel matrix job names include the matrix variables and quite easily, in complex configurations, exceed the static 255 character limit of job names, preventing job creation/execution.
There's been years of discussion about ways to fix it with nothing moving forward.
I have fond memories of using GitLab CI in 2018–2019 and I'm still pissed GitHub didn't just life and shift that kind of a model. Not sure about the particular issues you're running into but I remember GitLab supporting a lot of the YAML features missing in GitHub like anchors in order to build/compose stuff.
Agreed. I worked with Gitlab CI on the daily from 2021 till 2024 and I started curating a diary of bugs and surprising behavior I encountered in Gitlab.
No matter what I did, every time I touched our CI pipeline code I could be sure to run into yet another Gitlab bug.
It’s great if you have relatively simple CI. If you have anything slightly more complicated (like multiple child pipelines for a monorepo) you’re going to have a rough time.
Every time I thought I understood GitLab CI, it would fail/behave in non-obvious ways.
The split between tag and branch pipelines seems like intentional obfuscation with no upsides (you can't build non-latest commit from a branch, and when you use a tag to select the commit, GitLab intentionally hides all branch-related info, and skips jobs that depend on branch names).
"CI components" are not really components, but copy-paste of YAML into global state. Merging of jobs merges objects but not arrays, making composition unreliable or impossible.
The `steps` are still unstable/experimental. Composing multiple steps either is a mess of appending lines of bash, or you have go all the way in the other direction and build layered Docker images.
I could go on all day. Programming in YAML is annoying, and GitLab is full of issues that make it even clunkier than it needs to be.