Feature request: warning status for workflow steps and jobs

[joshua-clayton]

Select Topic Area

Bug

Body

A Warning is an important feature for a CI tool,

I was really surprised to find it missing in github actions.

This has been asked for before many times (perhaps only in wrong places)
e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74907704/is-there-a-github-actions-warning-state , isaacs/github#1465

For backward compatibility I would suggest adding a new flag e.g. warn-on-failure to jobs and steps that would change the status to warning (it could behave like continue-on-error). Since warning status doesn't cause a job to fail or block (mainly just shows a yellow warning Icon), it would also be appropriate for ::warning printings to trigger the status, or alternatively to add a new workflow command to explicitly set warning status. The main backward compatibility concern would be workflows that are checking explicitly for "success", and by adding new features that have to be explicitly added, this concern can be removed.

[github-actions[bot]]

💬 Your Product Feedback Has Been Submitted 🎉

Thank you for taking the time to share your insights with us! Your feedback is invaluable as we build a better GitHub experience for all our users.

Here's what you can expect moving forward ⏩

• Your input will be carefully reviewed and cataloged by members of our product teams. 
  • Due to the high volume of submissions, we may not always be able to provide individual responses.
  • Rest assured, your feedback will help chart our course for product improvements.
• Other users may engage with your post, sharing their own perspectives or experiences. 
• GitHub staff may reach out for further clarification or insight. 
  • We may 'Answer' your discussion if there is a current solution, workaround, or roadmap/changelog post related to the feedback.

Where to look to see what's shipping 👀

• Read the Changelog for real-time updates on the latest GitHub features, enhancements, and calls for feedback.
• Explore our Product Roadmap, which details upcoming major releases and initiatives.

What you can do in the meantime 💻

• Upvote and comment on other user feedback Discussions that resonate with you.
• Add more information at any point! Useful details include: use cases, relevant labels, desired outcomes, and any accompanying screenshots.

As a member of the GitHub community, your participation is essential. While we can't promise that every suggestion will be implemented, we want to emphasize that your feedback is instrumental in guiding our decisions and priorities.

Thank you once again for your contribution to making GitHub even better! We're grateful for your ongoing support and collaboration in shaping the future of our platform. ⭐

[joshua-clayton]

I read feature requests should go here. If it is wrong to classify thei as a bug, let me know. I'm an active user, an minor contributor to a few github actions. I'd be happy to write code and submit a Pull Request if I knew where to do that, despite my not being a Javascript guy.

[joshua-clayton]

Warning status would be a valuable feature for the code scanning Github is offering

[joshua-clayton]

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/11592 Found similar discussion. Doesn't look like github staff ever looked at it.

[hiniko]

I second this!

In my use case I run tests in parallel with a matrix.

The testing job is allowed to fail, and has continue-on-error enabled. There a a few error states here:

• the test runner failed to run
• the tests failed

The tests run to completion and then are collated from the matrix in to a reporting step, to fail the workflow and write back to the PR test results

Flow wise this works. However looking at the summary of the jobs it is not obvious which job caused the failure, as they all are marked as success.

We are getting around this using custom errors that propagate to the test summary, but being able to see which runs need attention from by manually setting a warning state in a step, that has an appropriate icon in ui would be useful.

[ariccio]

Me too - I just noticed that the swiftlint step in certain places was silently failing for copilot because the setup step wasn't working. Silent failures are always a very painful anti-pattern.