Allow only one top-level definition in includes

added Category:Continuous Integration devopsverify grouppipeline execution pipeline typefeature labels

changed title from Allow only top-level includes to Allow only one top-level definition in includes

changed the description

I'm not sure I understand @matteeyah. Can you elaborate? I though that includes and extends are orthogonal features (but kind of related, of course)?

changed the description

I'll give an example to better illustrate - if we have two CI config files (a.gitlab-ci.yml and b.gitlab-ci.yml).

# a.gitlab-ci.yml

variables:
  my_variable: my_value

include:
  local: b.gitlab-ci.yml

example_job:
  script:
    - echo $my_variable

and

# b.gitlab-ci.yml

variables:
  my_variable: my_other_value

other_job:
  script:
    - echo "${$my_variable} hello"

The proposal is to disallow having two top-level variables (or any other) definitions and force using extends instead.

@matteeyah can you please add an example of what you propose changing the above to?

The proposal is to disallow having two top-level variables definitions - i.e. the above config should be considered invalid.

Actually variables: are fine, as they are joined together, and this is actually quite OK.

Problems happens when we merge items that are not mergeable, like before_script: and we do not clearly state what is being overwritten and in what order. Maybe this should be disallowed?