Design: Help users understand the status of their cleanup policy

Release notes

You heard that GitLab added cleanup policies for container images and you rejoiced. But then you set one up and it didn't do what you thought it should. And you had no way of knowing what happened or to find out how.

We heard that feedback and now we plan on tackling this with empathetic design. Moving forward you can expect that you'll be notified when the cleanup policy is in progress but not completed, as well as the job is scheduled to run but has not started.

We look forward to continuing to improve this feature for you.

Problem to solve

I, as a Project Admin, need a way to understand what is happening with my project's cleanup policy so that I can better troubleshoot the issue and remove all of my old, unwanted container images from the registry.

Proposal

Design a way to use the expiration_policy_cleanup_status to help users of the cleanup policy to understand the status of their project's policy.

A policy can have the following status updates:

• cleanup_unscheduled: There is nothing to do (default state)
• cleanup_scheduled: A cleanup has been scheduled and it will be picked up by the backend shortly
• cleanup_ongoing: The backend is currently executing the cleanup
• cleanup_unfinished: The backend had to stop the cleanup and was not able to fully complete it (timeout)