[Idea] Optional Builds for PR Validation

[Chris Blank (ChrisBlankDe)]

Idea Description

I would like to propose a new setting: optionalPatternForPrValidation.

The idea is that this setting is a string array containing patterns (regex and/or wildcard-like patterns) that are matched against job names in the build matrix.

For pull request status checks, the behavior would change as follows:

• Today: the PR check fails if any matrix job fails.
• Proposed: if a failed job matches a pattern in optionalPatternForPrValidation, the overall PR status check can still pass.

Use Case

A good example is running validation against nextminor in pull requests.
This validation is very valuable for compatibility insights, but it may not always need to block the PR.

Open Questions

1. Should pattern matching use wildcard/like logic (similar to conditional settings) or regex?
2. Would it make sense to automatically post/update a PR comment when only optional jobs fail?
   • This would make the result easy to trace later.
   • It could also help teams enforce policies through comment resolution.

Note

If you have multiple jobs with the same name, a branch ruleset requires that all of these jobs run successfully. Since the goal is to keep the ruleset consistent, it is therefore not possible to extend Al-Go with custom jobs to gain this functionality.

Note: AI only helped me phrase this text. The thoughts and ideas behind it are my own.

Contribution (Optional)

• I would be open to contributing to this idea (implementation, documentation, testing, etc.)

[Chris Blank (ChrisBlankDe)]

As we discussed off-GitHub we will provide an PullRequest for this feature as described above.

• wildcard matching should be used similar to conditional settings.
• since you were concerned about the permissions we will not implement anything like PR comment in the first step.