Build workflow stays pending on docs PRs

[Pavithra Eswaramoorthy]

Describe the bug

The build.yml workflow is not run for PRs that update docs, but it's required for merging. This causes the check to remain hanging, blocking PR merges (without overrides), see: #189

Ref, see the first note here: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/managing-workflow-runs/skipping-workflow-runs

To Reproduce

Make a PR that updates only documentation.

Expected behavior

The check is either skipped by default, or we add docs for how to skip it.

Additional context

I don't know if [skip ci] (ref) skips all checks or only pending ones, will verify on a new PR.

If this works, we can just add a note in the contributing docs. Else, needs further investigation.

[Tim Paine]

This is intentional behavior, if you specify a check as required for merge (which is desired to require CI to be passing) but skip that check (e.g. docs only to conserve CI resources) it will show as pending, when in fact it's just skipped. Idk if GitHub plans to change this in the future, currently there is no "A or B should pass". All maintainers still have the ability to merge.

one alternative is to deploy wiki from a separately protected branch, but that can get messy in my experience.