Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there are two aspects to arbitrary builds: 1. Periodic jobs (not linked to a pushed commit) 2. Not linked to a git repo At GitLab we try to have 'infrastructure as code'. We think builds should be under version control to allow for collaboration. But periodic jobs make a lot of sense and it is discussed in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/2989
well I know you have great idea's but sadly a lot of the focus of gitlab at the moment is either monetizing with EE (which I can understand, I need to develop for my income aswell..) and the other with adding features to CE (which of course leads to the first). Sadly this does not fix bugs. And the issue tracker of gitlab-ce grows and grows and the CI is not really stable. The new permission model was great, but brea…
The issue tracker is growing because we also keep feature proposals there.
GitLab CI doesn't poll the repository. The GitLab Runner does poll GitLab for new jobs. We're currently working on making sure that GitLab can deal with those requests more efficiently. Polling makes setting up Runners a lot easier for our users.
Not being able to retry half of your builds sounds very bad. Please contact support@ our domain and add a link to this comment to receive help with that.
It was a big thing to add CI to GitLab and we had a lot of concerns about it before we did so. But after doing it the improvements in the interface, CD functionality, Pages, review apps, auto deploy, and many other things convinced us that this is the right path.
GitLab will work with other tools but out of the box it will offer you a great experience. For the benefits of that please see https://about.gitlab.com/2016/11/14/idea-to-production/