How to only add label, not remove when PR is opened?

[pllim]

I have a labeler action set up for when PR is opened, using all your default settings. The labeler YAML is set up as such (relevant parts listed below):

Docs:
  - docs/*

coordinates:
  - '**/coordinates/**/*'

When astropy/astropy#11023 was opened, the only file changed was docs/coordinates/apply_space_motion.rst. By the labeler logic, it should apply Docs and coordinates.

However, the PR author already manually applied Docs label at creation time. As a result, the labeler ended up removing the Docs label. Is this a bug? How do I tell it to simply no-op when a label that should be applied is already there?

Hope you can help and thanks for such a useful action!

[pllim]

Strangely enough, accidental removal did not happen for astropy/astropy#11028 when the file changed was only docs/conf.py and Docs label was also applied manually when PR was opened.

(The Action ran successfully but it was a no-op, as expected.)

[makecir]

There hasn't been much progress in the conversation, but I also want to solve this problem.
By removing the manually attached tags, the benefits gained by labelar are diminished.

[ericdallo]

Any news here?

[adam-azarchs]

It looks like the problem is

labeler/src/labeler.ts

Line 18 in 5906282

const syncLabels = !!core.getInput("sync-labels", { required: false });

which is not correct because the default value is "false", and !!"false" == true.

[adam-azarchs]

Confirmed, you can work around this bug by setting

sync-labels: ''

in your workflow.

[liverpool1026]

Confirmed, you can work around this bug by setting

sync-labels: ''

in your workflow.

Thanks for this, can also confirm this works in v4. Any plans to fix this properly in the next version?

[xSAVIKx]

This still may happen with v5 action if the labels are added by the user at the time that's very close to the action run:

User added labels at 2024-07-19T15:07:34Z. Bot added his own at 2024-07-19T15:07:35Z.

And bot started running at 2024-07-19T15:07:34Z as per GH action logs. So my guess is that it read labels, then user added his labels, then bot applied the rules and has overridden some of the labels the user has previously added.

WF config:

# .github/workflows/auto-labeler.yaml
name: "Pull Request Labeler"
on:
  pull_request_target:
    types: [ opened, reopened, synchronize ]

jobs:
  labeler:
    permissions:
      contents: read
      pull-requests: write
    runs-on: ubuntu-22.04
    steps:
      - uses: actions/labeler@v5
        with:
          sync-labels: false
          dot: true
          configuration-path: .github/labeler.yaml

Related rules:

"/web":
  - any:
      - changed-files:
          - any-glob-to-any-file:
              - SOME FILES
javascript:
  - any:
      - changed-files:
          - any-glob-to-any-file:
              - src/js/**