Make CI pipeline warnings visible
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Release notes
Problem to solve
We have CI pipeline jobs that are allowed to fail, as we only want to warn users about a minor compliance issue without blocking their pipeline. (Yet; we may be giving them a grace period to bring external repository metadata into compliance, and a future pipeline run may result in a failure.) However, when such a job fails, the only indication is an exclamation point on the pipeline in a merge request, and we've seen that user behavior is to ignore this indication. If they do go to investigate, they will have to dig through the job logs to find the relevant warning. We can of course use text highlighting tricks in the CI job output to draw a user's attention to the specific error, but it would be nicer if there was a way for a CI job to explicitly report a warning to GitLab that could then be shown in the merge request page.
Suggestion for proposal
One potential means of implementation would be to create a new report type. I've looked through all the existing report types, and the closest match I could find would be the artifacts:reports:codequality report; however, this would result in a collapsed section in the merge request widget, and I'm advocating for something that would allow a CI job to list a warning that would be prominently displayed, directly under the pipeline results (and probably visually a part of it). The report format could be designed to provide a short summary, which would be immediately visible, and a detailed message, which could be viewed by selecting a dropdown.