Add change detection to CI to limit testing requirements

[d-montgomery]

Testing to see if the updated CI from #687 is working

[d-montgomery]

The changes from #687 worked but the branch protection rules for the development branch results in the remaining tests being listed as "required."

[d-montgomery]

@baperry2, the changes made in #687 were a good start but the testing still showed many of the tests as "required." I've added a new Detect-Changes test to ci.yml and downstream.yml that can be used as a conditional based on the types of files that have been changed. This provides a little more flexibility than the previous PR and enables PelePhysics-CI/Codespell to run when changes have been made to Docs or python scripts.

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR updates the GitHub Actions CI configuration to use an explicit “Detect-Changes” job (via dorny/paths-filter) and then conditionally runs heavier jobs only when non-doc/non-utility changes are present, instead of relying on paths-ignore at the workflow trigger level.

Changes:

• Added a Detect-Changes job to compute whether “source” changes are present.
• Gated downstream/CI jobs behind needs: Detect-Changes and an if: condition based on the computed output.
• Adjusted CI job dependencies (e.g., Codespell) to depend on change detection rather than formatting.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 2 out of 2 changed files in this pull request and generated 4 comments.

File	Description
.github/workflows/downstream.yml	Adds change detection and conditionally runs downstream validation jobs based on detected changes.
.github/workflows/ci.yml	Adds change detection and conditionally runs most CI jobs based on detected changes; updates job dependencies accordingly.

Suppressed comments (3)

.github/workflows/downstream.yml:86

• needs.Detect-Changes.outputs.has-source-changes is not valid GitHub Actions expression syntax because both the job id and output name contain -. This will fail to parse (hyphens are treated as operators). Use bracket notation (or rename the ids) when accessing needs/outputs.

    if: needs.Detect-Changes.outputs.has-source-changes == 'true'

.github/workflows/ci.yml:73

• needs.Detect-Changes.outputs.has-source-changes is not valid GitHub Actions expression syntax because both the job id and output name contain -. This will fail to parse (hyphens are treated as operators). Use bracket notation (or rename the ids) when accessing needs/outputs.

    if: needs.Detect-Changes.outputs.has-source-changes == 'true'

.github/workflows/ci.yml:109

• needs.Detect-Changes.outputs.has-source-changes is not valid GitHub Actions expression syntax because both the job id and output name contain -. This will fail to parse (hyphens are treated as operators). Use bracket notation (or rename the ids) when accessing needs/outputs.

    if: needs.Detect-Changes.outputs.has-source-changes == 'true'

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[d-montgomery]

@copilot change this to needs['Detect-Changes'].outputs['has-source-changes'] == 'true' for consistency with all other instances. Add to current pending batch commit