Way to specify runs-on labels of sub workflow in parent GitHub workflow?

I have a couple of GitHub workflows divided into parent ones and reusable workflows.

The parents are build and deploy, each triggered at different circumstances and calling the subworkflows with different input parameters.

Subworkflows are basically build scripts that consist of several steps, like checkouts, fetching other artifacts and then building on mac or windows machine.

The problem is that I would like to specify on what runner the sub workflow is going to run from the parent script.

I would like to run the build subworkflow on a different runner when called from parent deploy.yml and from build.yml. I have setup 2 self-hosted runners, each with different labels, lets say [self-hosted, macOS] and [self-hosted, macOS, deploy].

I tried adding a string input parameter to the subworkflow and then used it like this:

  MacBuild:
    name: Mac build
    uses: ./.github/workflows/build-mac.yml
    with:
      build_installer: true
      installer_artifact: true
      runner_tags: "[self-hosted, macOS, deploy]"
    secrets: inherit

then in sub workflow

 runs-on: ${{ inputs.runner_tags }}

and it actually parsed it OK, saying that "Requested labels: [self-hosted, macOS, deploy]", but the runner never actually picked up the job, even it was idle.

Is there a way to do what I want?

---

This is the deploy.yml file:

name: Deploy

on:
  push:

jobs:          

  MacBuild:
    name: Mac build
    uses: ./.github/workflows/build-mac.yml
    with:
      build_installer: true
      installer_artifact: true
    secrets: inherit

This is the build-mac.yml file:

name: Build Release Mac

on:
  workflow_call:
    inputs:
      build_installer:
        description: 'Sign products and build isntaller'
        type: boolean
        required: false
        default: false
      installer_artifact:
        description: 'Upload installer to artifacts'
        type: boolean
        required: false
        default: false

  
jobs:
  MacBuild:
    name: macOS Build Release
    runs-on: [self-hosted, macOS]
    steps:
      
      - name: Checkout Repository
        uses: actions/checkout@main
        with:
          path: ${{ github.event.repository.name }}   

      - name: Check out other repository
        uses: actions/checkout@main
        with:
         repository: organization/other_repository
         token: ${{ secrets.RUNNERS_PAT }}
         path: other_repository
         ref: development   # branch

Already tried passing the runner labels as string parameter these ways:

• "self-hosted,macOS,deploy"
• "self-hosted, macOS, deploy"
• "[self-hosted, macOS, deploy]"

didn't work, runner didn't pick up the job.

Duplicate (similar) to How to Dynamically assign the runs-on value in the github actions

This answer helped: https://stackoverflow.com/a/73253764/19599681

I used another sub workflow input parameter - bool, to decide what runner flags to use, so the script looks like this:

name: Build Mac Release

on:
  workflow_call:
    inputs:
      build_installer:
        description: 'Sign products and build isntaller'
        type: boolean
        required: false
        default: false
      installer_artifact:
        description: 'Upload installer to artifacts'
        type: boolean
        required: false
        default: false
      deploy_runner:
        description: 'Use deploy runner'
        type: boolean
        required: false
        default: false
  
jobs:
  MacBuild:
    name: macOS Build Release
    runs-on: ${{ (inputs.deploy_runner) && fromJSON('[ "self-hosted", "macOS", "deploy" ]') || fromJSON('[ "self-hosted", "macOS"]') }}

I believe it could be possible to just send the string with tags as an input parameter and parse it here by fromJSON(), but I have not tested that.