ci: don't treat "waiting" runs as active in the bot-CI priority gate

[szihs]

Motivation

nv-slang-bot draft CI has been running zero tests and piling up in a waiting deadlock. Over the last 600 ci.yml runs (8 days), of 90 bot workflow_dispatch runs: 45 completed having run nothing, 29 are stuck in waiting having run nothing (29/29 verified: wait-for-human-priority failed and every build job skipped), and only 5 succeeded.

Root cause is an interaction between two mechanisms:

• wait-for-priority.py (the gate, first job of every bot dispatch) yields the run when higher-priority CI is "active".
• retry-yielded-bot-ci.py (the retry) only reruns a yielded bot run when no CI is "active".

Both use ACTIVE_STATUSES in extras/ci/ci_priority_common.py, which included "waiting".

In GitHub Actions, waiting means a job is parked on an environment protection rule, not that it is consuming a runner. The only environment gate in this repo is falcor-ci (a manual ci-approvers approval on the Falcor bridge test). Since #12614 added falcor-build-approval-gate (a job that needs: [filter] and carries environment: falcor-ci), every run now enters waiting almost immediately and stays there until a human approves.

With "waiting" counted as active, the result is a deadlock:

• the priority gate always sees "CI busy" -> every bot dispatch yields and runs nothing;
• the retry always sees "CI not quiet" -> yielded runs are never rerun.

Before #12614, environment: falcor-ci sat only on the leaf test-falcor job (#11915), so runs reached waiting late and briefly, and the hazard stayed latent.

Proposed solution

Drop "waiting" from ACTIVE_STATUSES. A run parked on the falcor-ci human approval is idle build-wise and must not count as runner contention. Runs that genuinely hold or await runners are queued / in_progress / requested / pending and remain counted; an approval-parked run flips to those states once approved and is counted then. test-falcor stays human-gated exactly as intended — this only changes how the priority scripts account for the waiting state.

Change summary

File	Change
extras/ci/ci_priority_common.py	Remove "waiting" from ACTIVE_STATUSES; add a comment explaining the falcor-ci reasoning and the single-environment assumption.

Blast radius

ACTIVE_STATUSES / fetch_active_runs are read in exactly two places, both intended:

• wait-for-priority.py::classify_blockers — stops yielding to approval-parked runs.
• retry-yielded-bot-ci.py::any_active_ci — lets the retry drain the backlog.

Not affected: ci-queue-status.py (uses its own independent "waiting" literal for reporting; does not import this module), the analytics suite and its tests, the anti-starvation aging logic, and all workflow YAML (no status literals passed).

Residual note captured in the code comment: this is correct because falcor-ci is the only environment. If a second environment gate is ever added whose pending state should count as contention, this must be revisited.

[coderabbitai]

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Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between eb20c14 and de8b608.

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• extras/ci/ci_priority_common.py

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📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

The shared CI priority status set no longer treats GitHub Actions runs waiting for falcor-ci environment approval as active runner contention. Queued, in-progress, requested, and pending runs remain active.

Changes

CI status filtering

Layer / File(s)	Summary
Active status contract extras/ci/ci_priority_common.py	ACTIVE_STATUSES excludes waiting and retains queued, in_progress, requested, and pending statuses.

Suggested reviewers: bmillsnv

Merge Risk: ⚪ Minimal · up to de8b6

This localized change stops approval-parked CI runs from being treated as active contention; no actionable merge-blocking risk remains beyond normal checks and review.

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5

✅ Passed checks (5 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Description check	✅ Passed	The description clearly explains the deadlock caused by counting GitHub Actions waiting runs as active and documents the proposed change to ACTIVE_STATUSES.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly and concisely describes the main change: excluding waiting runs from the bot-CI priority gate's active-run accounting.
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	Docstring coverage is 100.00% which is sufficient. The required threshold is 80.00%. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 1 functions across 1 files.
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.

✨ Finishing Touches 💡 1

🛠️ Fix failing CI checks 💡

• Create stacked PR
• Commit on current branch

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