Fix CI caching/upload with STATIC_DEPS

[rotu]

CI does not appear to work as intended - for example, none of the CI cases currently appear to respect the "STATIC_DEPS" setting, (e.g. not that no wheel is uploaded where STATIC_DEPS is intended to be true: e.g. https://github.com/lxml/lxml/actions/runs/5287691371/jobs/9568495615

Github Actions doesn't allow matrix values to be structured objects (I believe they are always strings, even if they look like numbers or booleans) and doesn't seem to automatically update the variable environment from matrix.env.VARNAME.

Instead I changed the variables to use the naming convention env-VARNAME and merged them into the job-level variable environment. This makes the CI work as seemingly intended.

I considered using a structured value with the toJSON/fromJSON functions but this is less easy to understand and more error-prone.

The comparison in the if-statement matrix.os.STATIC_DEPS == 'true' is false when given the boolean value true.

It's not clear to me whether matrix.env can indeed be an object or only a string. As documented, only strings are allowed, but I filed an issue requesting clarification.

[scoder]

Hmm. STATIC_DEPS definitely works. See, for example, the difference between
https://github.com/lxml/lxml/actions/runs/5287691371/jobs/9568490891 (false)
https://github.com/lxml/lxml/actions/runs/5287691371/jobs/9568490754 (true)
The latter builds the dependencies statically, the first doesn't.

[rotu]

Hmm. STATIC_DEPS definitely works. See, for example, the difference between ... The latter builds the dependencies statically, the first doesn't.

Interesting. I don't know what I'm looking at - what in the logs tells you that it builds statically?

1. In both cases, I see the Cache [libs] step is not running (which is what made me think STATIC_DEPS was completely ignored
2. I do see the STATIC_DEPS environment variable set correctly in the "Run CI" step so I suspect you're right.

[rotu]

Aha! I misdiagnosed the issue.

First, here are some dead ends I chased down:

• Despite documentation that matrix.<property_name> is a string, it can indeed be an object.
• if: 'true' and if: true both run a step and if: 'false' and if: false both skip that step.
• Assigning an object to env: ${{ matrix.env }} does indeed work, even though the VSCode plugin "github.vscode-github-actions" does not like it. It does not matter whether the YAML is given in block-style or flow-style.

And the answer:

The issue is the expression ${{ matrix.env.STATIC_DEPS == 'true' }} which evaluates to false because it's checking equality between a boolean and a string.

[scoder]

Thanks