Hello!

We would like to build a fairly unsophisticated set of actions to automate release pipelines, based on pull request coments, and currently we are utilising the syntax to be able to have conditional jobs.

name: Complete Release
on:

issue_comment:
jobs:

merge-release-into-master:

runs-on: ubuntu-latest

name: Merge release branch into master

if: github.event.comment && github.event.comment.body == 'release-complete'

It’s working fairly well, with exception on how Github handles such runs. Used syntax means that this workflow is triggered on a comment for every issue and PR. 

Before we saw these workflows as “skipped”. You couldn’t really access the workflow run, clicking on it would show you that workflow never started. Since some recent changes, these skipped runs are starting to show as failed and we started to get notifications from those.

It would be great though, if there would be a way to completely prevent workflow from running, or at least exclude such “shadow runs” from UI. 

Syntax could look something like this:

name: Complete Release
on:

issue_comment:

if: github.event.comment && github.event.comment.body == 'release-complete'
jobs:

merge-release-into-master:

runs-on: ubuntu-latest

name: Merge release branch into master

Every skipped workflow takes some amount of time to run, for us it’s around 3s. It’s hard to say what’s happening, but in case if it’s spinning off VM and consuming concurrency jobs limit, it would quickly become a problem for a large repo with lots of comments and other workflows. Statement above is rather a speculation, so it be great to get some clarification on this to understand what’s happening under the hood for such workflows.

Thank you!

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