What's the use case for GitLab CI's `dependencies`?

Question

GitLab CI has the concept of dependencies, which "should be used in conjunction with artifacts and allows you to define the artifacts to pass between different jobs".

However, "artifacts from all previous stages are passed by default". Which leads me to conclude that you only need to use dependencies when needing to pass artifacts between jobs in the same or later stages. However, "an error will be shown if you define jobs from the current stage or next ones."

So if it need not be used for previous stages, and cannot be used for anything other than previous stages, when would you use dependencies?

Answer 1

artifacts from all previous stages are passed by default

Means just that. By default you get all the dependencies. However there are times when you don't want all of them. For example if the last step in your pipe is sending a notification to slackchat you don't want to download hundreds of megabytes of artifacts just to do that.