Allow actions to set "neutral" conclusion

[jalaziz]

Today, it seems there is no good or easy way to conclude a Github Action as anything other than a success or failure. However, the Checks API supports other conclusions that can be useful for an Action.

There have been several discussions around this, and it seems that the ability to set the neutral conclusion by way of exit code was removed. The primary use case in some of the discussions seems to have been skipping a workflow. However, there are other uses for neutral that aren't solved by skipping.

For example, we would like to introduce an Action that confirms a commit message meets certain criteria. However, some of the criteria is optional, but we'd like to warn developers when they're missing. In this case, failing the workflow is too harsh, and success doesn't seem correct either.

It would be great if a neutral or warning conclusion could be set through a workflow command or some other mechanism.

[lhstrh]

Our project would benefit from having this feature as well. I arrived here via isaacs/github#1465 which describes the same need.

[ethomson]

Thanks, @jalaziz - I agree that this would be useful. I'm sorry that we haven't gotten to this yet (it actually touches a lot of different pieces in the platform) but this is on our backlog to improve in the future. Thanks again.

[mlocati]

@ethomson Just a side note: there's the open issue https://github.com/actions/toolkit/issues/399 where a ton of users has been asking for something like this for a couple of years.

[pboling]

Worth noting that there are around 500 interactions on that actions/toolkit issue! So many projects making commits referencing it...

When people make commits decrying the absurdity of this missing feature, please be sure to reference this feedback discussion also.

[eregon]

I created a separate discussion about this, which really focus on the heart of that issue: #15452
This discussion seems rather unspecific, and I think showing exactly what needs to improve is more helpful.

[pboling]

The absence of this feature has wasted hours of my time while supporting community ruby gems, like oauth and oauth2, that have ostensibly more important things I could work on, than futzing with Github Actions.

I hope it makes it up the backlog quickly!

[carmanchris31]

EDIT: It looks like this is actually supported already?

The final conclusion of the check. Can be one of action_required, cancelled, failure, neutral, success, skipped, stale, or timed_out
—source

[lucasff]

A check run isn't the same as a step on a GitHub Action workflow that is allowed to fail.
Microsoft, pretty please?

[pboling]

@eregon has created another Feedback Discussion that is more explicitly targeted to the ask for an allow_failure:
#15452