Try to get a green checkmark even though an optional job failed

[wsanchez]

GHA workflows fail when a job fails.

We use continue-on-error to prevent halting the workflow, and that is good enough for validation prior to merge, it leaves us with a visually annoying red X where we want to see a green checkmark.

What we want is support in GHA for the workflow to ignore specific job failures, but that doesn't exist. (A very popular but unimplemented feature request already exists for this.)

This PR is an attempt at a work-around.

[wsanchez]

Emitting a warning adds an annotation to the job, which you might notice (but probably won't) if you look at the job (which you normally wouldn't do). So that's unsatisfying.

[wsanchez]

GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY output goes into the workflow summary page, but that is not exactly a thing you'd see normally either… not great.

[codecov]

Codecov Report

All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests ✅

Project coverage is 68.97%. Comparing base (758f3a5) to head (fbad1bb).

Additional details and impacted files

@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##           master    #1347      +/-   ##
==========================================
- Coverage   69.00%   68.97%   -0.03%     
==========================================
  Files         181      181              
  Lines        8865     8865              
  Branches     1484     1484              
==========================================
- Hits         6117     6115       -2     
- Misses       2648     2649       +1     
- Partials      100      101       +1     

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[github-actions]

⚠️ Optional matrix job Py:3.14.0-alpha.1 - ubuntu-latest failed ⚠️

• tox prefix: test
• exit status: 1

[wsanchez]

OK this is decent… here we get

• a green checkmark for the job (not great, but this is the trade-off we are making)
• a green checkmark for the workflow (the goal here)
• a comment in the PR indicating that an optional build failed (replacement for red checkmark for the job)

[ktomk]

IIRC $? is a feature of any shell, most likely any shell in Microsoft Github Actions, therefore both lines can be condensed to a single line on the second lines' composition:

tox run -e "${TOX_ENV}"; status=$?

Thanks for posting a useful comment updating the other thread! @wsanchez