Fail Instead of Warn for Unknown Properties

Describe the bug

I originally opened this issue in actions/stale as this is the action I used when first experiencing this, but think it belongs here instead.

When unknown properties are included as part of an action, there is only a warning message that displays that Unexpected input has been provided (#429). Since the action does not fail, users can miss this information for some time. It can also lead to the action being executed in an unintended way. It would be helpful if there was an option to fail if unknown properties are included.

To Reproduce Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Use actions/stale
2. Include an unknown property
3. When it runs, see that the warning is displayed but the action still runs.

Expected behavior

The action should not run if unexpected input is provided or there should be a way to configure a failure if unexpected input is provided.

Job Log Output

https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/carvel-kbld/actions/runs/497411016

[hross]

We will probably not change the behavior as it is today. I understand the desire for this but we don’t provide support at this moment and I don’t think this feature will gain more traction than other priorities in the next 6 months.

[eli-schwartz]

Cross-ref #514 where people actually complain that they cannot stand warnings at all. The actual issue there is that they have workflows which accept unbounded dynamic inputs, so the “expected use” of those workflows results in warnings.

Apparently this causes permanent yellow builds, which… conveniently are not shown anywhere and do not produce notifications, so it’s not even clear why this matters…

So the problem here is twofold:

• in cases where the warning is correct, users need a hard failure, warnings are useless, they just lead to silently broken builds
• in cases where the warning is incorrect, users need to completely suppress warnings, because fake warnings that aren’t correct lead to a culture of ignoring warnings, and these warnings are already so impossible to find that they need all the help they can possibly get to avoid being ignored even more.

No one is happy with the current state of affairs, but most people don’t actually realize github even tries to check this, so they assume this is just one more case of “computers suck, I should retire and take up woodworking instead”.

Pretending everything is fine, then closing the ticket because “this feature isn’t important to us” is a really bad state of affairs, and the biggest reason it is so terrible is because this is a bug report so please do not claim it is a feature, not a bug. 😃