[TovaBecker]

Fixes #764

Why

Labels matching labels.exclude are never deleted, but the dry-run PR comment still lists every one of them under deletions. With a broad pattern such as exclude: [{ name: '.*' }] (keep all existing labels, add a few managed ones), every existing label in every repo shows up as a deletion, including its id, node_id, and url.

In one organization with 51 repos, this filled the comment to the 55,536-character limit after 8 repos. About 93% of the comment was these phantom deletions, and the real changes for the remaining repos were cut off.

The cause: Labels.remove() skips excluded labels, but the summary is built by compareDeep in Diffable.sync(), which compares all existing labels with the config and doesn't know about exclude.

Approach

• Filter excluded labels out of the existing labels in Labels.find(), so they never enter the comparison, the summary, or remove().
• Keep excluded labels that the config manages (matched by name or oldname), so they can still be updated or renamed.
• Apply mode is unchanged: excluded labels were already never deleted.

Validation

• Full unit suite: 1006 passed, 12 skipped. Integration suite: 106 passed.
• 2 new tests in test/unit/lib/plugins/labels.test.js: an excluded label doesn't appear in the dry-run results (fails without the fix), and excluded labels that the config manages are still updated, renamed, and created.
• ESLint and standard report no new diagnostics on touched files.

[Copilot]

🟢 Approval recommended

The focused implementation matches the intended behavior and is adequately covered by tests.

0 open findings

What changed in this PR

Filters excluded labels from dry-run comparisons while retaining managed labels for updates and renames.

Changes:

• Excludes unmanaged protected labels from comparison results.
• Adds dry-run coverage for exclusion, update, rename, and creation behavior.

File	Description
lib/​plugins/​labels.js	Filters unmanaged excluded labels during discovery.
test/​unit/​lib/​plugins/​labels.test.js	Verifies corrected dry-run behavior.

🧠 Review effort: Balanced

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