GitLab product manager here. Would any of the cache best practices (https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/caching/#good-caching-practice...) be helpful for your use case? I'm interested to learn more about what's not working for your workloads; why cache is not improving the speed of your builds.
For a list of planned follow-up issues as we iterating on the parent-child pipeline MVC, please check out our epic for this feature: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/2750. We welcome your comments and up-votes on the issues that matter most to you.
EDIT: Sorry; misread your first sentence; seems you saw the announcement that there is an alternative to passing variable via artifacts. Please consider opening an issue (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/new) to let us know how you would like jobs to communication.
GitLab PM here. Glad to hear scripts allow you to use our CI/CD, but sorry to hear that remote repository pull mirroring not being in Core prevents you from using it. Hope you know we do make it available at our lowest priced tier (Starter: $4/month/user).
As a new GitLab product manager, I was glad to see among the Updates that dispatch.sr.ht can now build GitLab commits. And we are looking at the mentioned GitLab bug (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/16491) to assess efforts to resolve; and unblock the ability to run build.sr.ht for GitLab merge requests.
