When I have a build job and a deploy job tied to the same Enterprise GitHub repo, commits run the build job via webhook and the deploy job is run by user clicking 'build' or run from some other job.

The status goes back to GitHub when either job completes.

Let's say I have a pull request on the repo. The build job (multibranch pipeline) runs and sends status successful which I've configured GitHub to enable merging the pull request due to successful build.

Then, someone runs a deploy job (plain pipeline) and the deployment fails due to connectivity. (I'm making this up how I want.) That sends the status back to GitHub and the pull request can no longer be merged.

The branches involved matter here. When the deploy job is tied to the same branch as the pull request, the problem definitely occurs. Other branch combination may or may not be a problem.

It's been enough of a problem that I've just turned off the GitHub option that only allows a merge of the PR if the Jenkins builds succeed.

This enhancement request is asking for an option either via pipeline code or a checkbox on the configure job page that indicates whether the job will return status to GitHub, or not. In pipeline code, it could either be code that disables the status being sent for this one job run OR it could work like the properties and apply to the next run of this job.

I'd also like to be able to have an UNSTABLE build allow merging but I'm not sure that's a Jenkins issue. Maybe its a GitHub issue.