Hi

Recently I'm evaluating a gitlab-based development workflow [1] for kexec-tools after knowing Gitlab is available is for Fedora [2]. The shared runner provided by Gitlab is quite slow. It took >3 hours for the share runner to finish three integration tests. By contrast, Github needs only 36mins. So I installed a specific runner which only needs 9mins to finish current tests. However, it was annoying to find out merge request created from a forked project can't use the installed specific runner even if the merge request is created by a project member. Since Fedora's projects are open-source, this problem makes Gitlab rather unfriendly to contributors. A partial solution is to use a feature "Run pipelines in the parent project' [3] but it's a premium feature and is still inconvenient for regular contributors who are project member and unfriendly towards casual contributors. The earliest complaint I have noticed is 4 years ago and it seems Gitlab won't fix this issue soon [5].

[1] https://gitlab.com/coxu/fedora-kexec-tools
[2] https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/gitlab-available-for-fedora
[3] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/pipelines/merge_request_pipelines.html#run-pipelines-in-the-parent-project
[4] https://forum.gitlab.com/t/use-runner-with-fork-without-shared-runner/16363
[5] https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/3278