How to name the first and last jobs in main GHA workflows?

[ssbarnea]

I am currently at the late stage of experimenting configuring a reusable GHA job matrix, one that would allow to enable testing of a new version of python on all our repos by making a single change inside one centralized matrix.yml file.

I need to pick you brain about how to name the first and the last jobs in the testing workflows so we would have consistent naming everywhere. The current prototype uses "pre" as initial job, and "check" for the last one, mainly because that was the name we already use everywhere.

Here are few details that should help you make a decision

• we need simple and short names, preferably single words
• while we do have unique goals for first and last jobs, we can easily expect to add other features to them, so naming them generic enough should make them more future proof
• first job (pre) does determine the job matrix to be run by effective "test" job
• last job (check) is looking at what jobs did run in "test" job matrix and fails the build if not all of them are green. That ensures that we do not accidentally mark as passed executions that skipped jobs, as this is a known issue with GHA.
• the last job name is configured inside each protection branch as being the only required job -- this ensures that we do not have to alter the branch projection when we add/remove jobs from the matrix
• we should look for names that we never have to change again

Please vote for one of the proposed names or suggest different pair.

[briantist]

pre and check seem fine to me; prepare could work as an alternative to pre maybe.

[apatard]

pre and check seems fine. I would keep things like post for the last job not doing anything related to checks, if we ever need that...