Update status check job to check status of precursor jobs

[jrhemstad]

Description

In our CI, we have a final job called ci that depends on all the prior jobs via needs:. This job is intended to be used as a status check such that a PR cannot be merged if this job has not been completed successfully.

However, the status check job was not working as intended. Most importantly, if predecessor jobs were skipped, then the CI job would be skipped. Skipped jobs report as successful for the purpose of status checks:

This is not what we want. We want the status check job to always run, and exit if any of the predecessor jobs failed.

This boils down to two things:

• Make the ci job always run by using if ${{ always() }}
• Make the ci job explicitly check the status of precursor jobs. This uses a slick trick of using a wildcard in needs.*.result to avoid having to re-list all of the jobs.

[jarmak-nv]

Do you think it's possible that the issues described here impact us? actions/runner#1540

I'm not 100% sure if indirect dependencies might cause problems, but just wanted to bring it to your attention if you hadn't seen it.

I think after re-reading this, we might want to change the

        if: >-
          ${{
               contains(needs.*.result, 'failure')
            || contains(needs.*.result, 'cancelled')
            || contains(needs.*.result, 'skipped')
          }}

to

        if: >-
          ${{
               contains(needs.*.result == 'failure')
            || contains(needs.*.result == 'cancelled')
            || contains(needs.*.result == 'skipped')
          }}

But again, not fully certain on this.

[jrhemstad]

Do you think it's possible that the issues described here impact us? actions/runner#1540

My reading is that this doesn't apply because we're not doing the contains logic as a job level conditional, but a step level conditional.

[jarmak-nv]

My reading is that this doesn't apply because we're not doing the contains logic as a job level conditional, but a step level conditional.

Oh right I always mix those up

[jarmak-nv]

LGTM 🚀