Build as first-class citizen, separate entity from artifacts

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Description

GitLab CI/CD provides an explicit build stage and the concept of build artifacts, but we might need to separate out the build artifacts from test artifacts. For example, you might want your test runner to create a JUnit-style output file which is available for external consumption, but not included in the build image sent to production. Creation of an explicit build aligns well with Docker where the result of the build stage is a Docker image which is stored in a registry and later pulled for testing and deployment. We could possibly designate a docker image as the artifact and automatically upload it to the registry; tagged appropriately. We could provide a history of builds. We could provide statistics for downloads/usage of builds.

Proposal

Links / references

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