"Checking pipeline status" for a merge request should include the reason why the check is still in progress

Summary

The "Troubleshooting CI/CD" page says, in the "Checking pipeline status" section:

This message is shown when the merge request has no pipeline associated with the latest commit yet. This might be because:

  • GitLab hasn't finished creating the pipeline yet.
  • You are using an external CI service and GitLab hasn't heard back from the service yet.
  • You are not using CI/CD pipelines in your project.
  • The latest pipeline was deleted (this is a known issue).

For the first case, it should say something such as "Waiting to create the pipeline" to indicate that the user needs to wait for GitLab to create the pipeline. If more information, such as, if the attempt to create the pipeline is stuck in a queue, is available, it should report that (and the queue position, if that's available - "there are 4 callers ahead of you").

For the second case, it should say something to indicate that it's waiting for some external CI service to respond - and indicate what service that is, if that makes sense.

For the third case, is there even a pipeline status to check? If not, it shouldn't be trying to check it.

The fourth case appears, from what I read of the issue, to be a known bug.

Steps to reproduce

Take a look at either this Wireshark merge request or this other Wireshark merge request which, at least as of 2020-09-09 09:07:05 UTC, have the spinning "Checking pipeline status". At least as of now, some jobs started about 15 minutes ago, and those merge requests were submitted before that, so at least some some jobs are getting run for Wireshark.

What is the current bug behavior?

A spinning "Checking pipeline status" with no indication of what's wrong, when the check will finish, or what I can do, if anything, to fix it.

What is the expected correct behavior?

Something that indicates what I should do, whether it's "fix XXX in your project" or "fix XXX in your merge request" or "be patient, you're queued up behind some other jobs" or....

Output of checks

This bug happens on GitLab.com.