When rebasing and submitting to github, workflows are run for the wrong paths

[Alex Coleman]

This may be more of a github issue, but posting here to start since its specific to Sapling afaict.

Context

Github Actions let you run tests on PRs based on changed file paths. For example, our monorepo project has folders "folder_a/**" and "folder_b/**", which each have their own suite of tests. To accomplish this, we use github action path filtering to only run the workflow if its relevant to files in the PR:

  pull_request:
    branches: [main, releases/*]
    paths:
      - folder_a/**

Normally this means that every time I submit a new commit to the PR, the files related to my net changes (against the main branch) have their tests run. Ex. if I create a PR touching "folder_a", "folder_a" tests run. If I then add a commit touching "folder_b", then both "folder_a" and "folder_b" have their tests run. Finally if I remove the changes to "folder_a", only "folder_b" tests will run.

Issue

After rebasing a PR using sapling and resubmitting it, tests seem to run for the incorrect files. In a PR that only touches "folder_a", sometimes both "folder_a" and "folder_b" run. I've even seen only "folder_b" run once. I'm guessing this has something to do with the force pushing, and perhaps some back-to-back changes applied to the PR causing a race condition.

To resolve the issue, I can add a random change to any file (in folder_a or folder_b), resubmit the PR, then remove the change and resubmit again. The net commit on the PR is identical, but this seemingly forces it to correctly detect the files.

This has been happening to us for a while but we hadn't realize the cause until recently.

Unfortunately there aren't great logs to indicate exactly which files/commits triggered the workflow. I could try adding some logging via other actions to understand what may be happening. I'm happy to help debug this, but wanted to first see if anyone here had immediate ideas of the cause.