Hacker News Reader

> For one of the software projects I'm involved in, I have more complex needs. We release binaries for multiple platforms so our Jenkins master delegates certain tasks to slaves running on specific OSes. Then at the end the Jenkins master downloads the built artifacts from all slaves and publishes everything to our artifact hosting server. As far as I can tell, Gitlab CI does not support this.

GitLab CI/CD can certainly run jobs on different OSes, then have a final job consolidate those artifacts and publish to an artifact server. What part can't GitLab do?

> In future CI jobs I may even require user interaction, e.g. I may ask a human to sign off a report. I don't think Gitlab CI can do this.

GitLab CI/CD has manual jobs so a pipeline can wait for human sign off before proceeding.

Can't you put the gitlab runner on whatever you want and set up CI environments to the runner?

The issue is that the configuration format makes complex jobs difficult to define. It's good for the simple case, but versus e.g. a Jenkinsfile[0] where you get a complete groovy DSL that can interact with it's environment across tasks, pipeline, branch, etc with ease it's rough. Having fine-grained control becomes important.

[0] https://jenkins.io/doc/book/pipeline/jenkinsfile/

> a Jenkinsfile[0] where you get a complete groovy DSL

Apache Groovy isn't "complete" as shipped with Jenkins. It's collections API is deliberately crippled so it doesn't work.

You could achieve something like this with tags - https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/#tags. Though you will need to define each machine individually in the CI file.