fix(workflows): auto-approve labelling conditional statement always runs true

[sumupitchayan]

Follow up to #1428

We initially wanted to conditionally set the auto-approve label of PR's in this workflow based on a testingMode input parameter. This first step is supposed to conditionally set the labels output to auto-approve if testingMode was set to false:

{
  name: 'Set auto-approve label for PR if in testing mode',
  id: 'set-auto-approve-label',
  if: '${{ github.event.inputs.testingMode }} == false',
  run: 'echo labels="auto-approve" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT',
  env: { GITHUB_TOKEN: '${{ secrets.PROJEN_GITHUB_TOKEN }}' },
  continueOnError: false,
},

And would then be used in the following step creating a PR like so:

...WorkflowActions.createPullRequest({
  ... ,
  labels: [
    '${{ steps.set-auto-approve-label.outputs.labels }}',
  ],
}),

However, there is a very annoying known bug in GitHub workflow steps where conditions are always evaluated as true when containing expression syntax inside. This causes the auto-approve label to always be added to PR's in the Kubernetes upgrade workflow, even when testingMode is set to true.

I've had a hard time finding workarounds to this problem. Right now what I'm just doing is manually commenting-out the steps that involve publishing or setting the auto-approve label of PR's created.

[iliapolo]

@sumupitchayan Can't you move the condition out of the if and inside the run directive. You would then set the step output to "auto-approve" if the condition is true, and to an empty string (or whatever can work that causes a no-op) when the condition is false.

[sumupitchayan]

@sumupitchayan Can't you move the condition out of the if and inside the run directive. You would then set the step output to "auto-approve" if the condition is true, and to an empty string (or whatever can work that causes a no-op) when the condition is false.

@iliapolo I tried doing that earlier with this:

        {
          name: 'Set auto-approve label for PR if in testing mode',
          id: 'set-auto-approve-label',
          run: 'if (${{ github.event.inputs.testingMode }} == false);then echo labels="auto-approve" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT;fi',
          env: { GITHUB_TOKEN: '${{ secrets.PROJEN_GITHUB_TOKEN }}' },
          continueOnError: false,
        },
        ...WorkflowActions.createPullRequest({
          ...
          labels: [
            '${{ steps.set-auto-approve-label.outputs.labels }}',
          ],
        }),

But it doesn't seem to be working in the Create PR step of the generate-new-k8s-spec job: see the logs here -- no auto-approve label is set on the PR even when I set the testingMode default to false

[iliapolo]

We decided to drop this