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This post is motivated by a desire to confirm some behavior that I've observed and discussed with Support with other members of the community.

I've observed that a workflow with the following configuration will result in some of its runs being absent from a PR's "merge box" intended to display all related commit statuses associated with the head of a PR's branch if it contains labels at open time.

name: pr labels
on:
  pull_request:
    types:
      - opened
      - labeled

In my case, I'm configuring a workflow that should run one set of jobs on a PR when it contains a specific label and another set of actions when a PR doesn't contain that label (mostly to communicate usage instructions via the merge box that explain that an action can be "dispatched" on a PR by adding a label) ¹². To accomplish the first portion of this logic, I listen to pull_request.labeled and pull_request.synchronize events. To present the usage instructions in the merge box on both the FIRST and SUBSEQUENT commits on a PR and to validate that the required actions have happened, I need to listen for both the pull_request.opened and pull_request.synchronize events.

Unfortunately, what I actually observe is that the pull_request.opened event fires and is displayed in the "merge box" at the bottom of the PR. pull_request.labeled events also fire if the PR has labels, but their statues are missing from the merge box.

According to GitHub Support, this "race condition" could potentially could affect more than just the UI. For example, if the workflow is a required check, it may make the PR unmergable. Support has suggested that I break the logic into two workflows, one that listens to pull_request.labeled events and another that listens to pull_request.opened events.

I don't see any documentation about this limitation of the pull_request event here, so I'm opening this discussion to share context with others in advance of possibly updating the documentation myself.

Have you seen this behavior? Do you have any workarounds other than duplicating logic between two workflows? How can a loving god cause such agony? Anyway, thanks in advance!