Yes, I was thinking of doing it here – I didn't find anything as to why CircleCI runs it when GHA skips it (at least, related to my PR). I'll take a look further.

I guess when running the tests on the scipy trigger, the GHA job runs mv scipy-conftest.py conftest.py to rename it, but the CircleCI jobs don't, so --runtime=firefox-no-host packages/*/test*.py --skip-passed won't pick up the configuration from that file. That doesn't explain how it worked before my PR, though, so my hunch is that checking for the commit message for [scipy] and renaming scipy-conftest.py should also be pursued in the CircleCI steps/jobs.

Found it, it's failing because of this line:

Some of the tests might have been skipped because of the pytest caching, but I think this should be safe to merge now – I verified locally in an IPython shell (in SciPy, this is python dev.py ipython) that this runs the ARPACK and LOBPCG tests, and the PROPACK ones are skipped.