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Allow child pipelines to trigger their own child pipelines

Problem to solve

With https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/22972 we introduce the new idea of child/parent pipelines. For the MVC, however, we limit the relationship only to parent->child, and disallow parent->child->child->(...). One level of relationship is good for many use cases, but in a more complex workflow you have pipeline branches creating one or maybe two pipeline branches of their own.

Intended users

Software Developers

Further details

Proposal

Remove the limitation for child pipelines, and set a maximum depth for relationships. A decent starter value could be 5, but even 2 is better (that at least unlocks an alternative to #229134 (closed)). If the max depth is reached, the pipeline should fail to start and return a failure status attribution, and there should be a clear message what happened.

We could implement this using Gitlab::ObjectHierarchy utility which is already used today for groups/sub-groups. This would allow us to find out all descendants or all ancestors as well as calculating the max_descendants_dept which should be used to enforce the limit.

  • change Ci::Pipeline#same_family_pipeline_ids to take in consideration a wider hierarchy
  • change Ci::CreateCrossProjectPipelineService#ensure_preconditions! to account for a wider hierarchy
  • ensure pipeline processing works as expected with status attribution

Permissions and Security

A maximum depth is important to prevent recursive/runaway pipelines causing a denial of service.

Documentation

Testing

What does success look like, and how can we measure that?

Links / references

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