I'm not sure why https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/integration/jenkins.html apparently doesn't support forks and our CI people to comment here.
In any case, we definitely want to make sure you have the right functionalities you need.
- there is a canonical git repo for a component
- a dev doesn't have write access to it
- they fork it into their own private user name space
- they change it and create a merge request for the canonical git repo for one of the branches
- the merge request creates (or triggers) a job in Jenkins => this is where our research showed that only the unmaintained gitlab-branch-source-plugin plugin can do that https://github.com/Argelbargel/gitlab-branch-source-plugin
- Jenkins builds it and reports the status back to GitLab
- If it created a new job that job is removed after the MR gets merged.
It would be nice if, like the other plugin does it one could have it's own job for this MR with it's own history but I guess we could live also with a shared history if you could have the MR buld history in GitLab only.
update: I forgot to write that we use Jenkinsfile based pipelines, not sure if this is important.
Jenkins has been nothing short of the devil for me.
Most of the things work great but we have the problem that we want to use Jenkins instead of the build in CI/CD solution but the only way to trigger MR jobs from GitLab forks in Jenkins is this non maintained plugin which has been in alpha since we started two years ago https://github.com/Argelbargel/gitlab-branch-source-plugin
So I wonder, what is the reason behind not investing into integrations with other CI systems like Jenkins which are hugely popular and used by so many people?