Andrew Bayer Executing discretion here... it feels like this ought to be do-able in some way with enough cleverness without checking out to a build agent, but it's definitely not a bug. So reclassifying and dropping priority because it's kind of edge-casey and potentially complex as well.
Sam Van Oort - fwiw, if there's any possible resolution, it'd be to do what freestyle does (if I remember correctly) and kick off a build if polling requires a workspace but there isn't one available. Some polling options do always require a workspace, so that's what we've got to play with. shrug
We're running into this issue, although we're using the "polling ignores commits with certain message" additional behavior. I'm wondering if disabling lightweight checkout might be a work around. My understanding is that will cause the repo to be cloned on the master in order to get the Jenkinsfile. We use spot instances heavily for build agents, but master should always be up, and we'd definitely be willing to take the performance hit and do the comparison on a clone on master to get the build trigger behavior we want.
Turns out, I'm afflicted by the same problem as well. So I'm voting for some sort of resolution, even if it involves kicking off a build, no matter how short it is (in Kubernetes, spinning a VM up and down quickly is mostly acceptable).