Catalog of downstream projects in a group affected by changes to YAML templates
Problem to solve
When modifying YAML files that are referenced via include
in downstream projects, there is no visibility into what or how downstream projects are affected.
Intended users
At the least, this would be of benefit to the following personas:
Further details
As companies implement templates for consistent build pipelines, the potential impact for any change to YAML templates grows. Provide the list of impacted projects, possibly directly in the MR. This would be step one of potentially larger changes.
Potential long-term goals could include:
- Automatically adding issues to affected projects to alert owners OR
- Automatically adding affected project owners to an issue in the template project
- Triggering a build in the affected project that picks up the changed (branched) template
Proposal
Catalog the list of projects where templates are included, and, as a first MVC, show that information on the MR. This could be limited to includes in projects somewhere within the root container namespace/group of the template project. Whether this is pulled as a "search" during MRs, or cataloged during the builds of the affected projects would need to be determined.
Permissions and Security
- Depending on the methods for "notification" used, there would be permissions concerns with creating issues or builds in downstream projects.
- Project visibility for the cataloging itself could also be a concern
Documentation
Availability & Testing
What does success look like, and how can we measure that?
Success will have many factors:
- Can the one making the change see the impacted projects?
- Is there some way we can notify those impacted projects
- Is there some way we can automatically validate the impacted projects?
What is the type of buyer?
This would primarily affect Enterprise-level customers