Workaround Renovate PR force-push spam

[cevich]

N/B: These changes will affect all containers-org projects setup with Renovate.

Ref:
containers/buildah#5007 (comment)

Attempt to limit excessive Renovate force-push activity related to golang update PRs. This is unlikely a perfect fix, and it may not address the problem at all. I believe there's a renovate and/or configuration bug here, but lack the resources/time to investigate more deeply - this likely requires a temp. reproduction repo. + mock golang package.

[cevich]

@rhatdan @Luap99 PTAL. I'm not super-confident about this, but it's the best I can do at the moment. If either of you have time to explore the issue deeper, that effort would be welcome and appreciated.

I'm calling "force-push spam", when Renovate ignores existing non-renovate commits on an update PR, ignores the stop-updating label, and force-pushes to it's PR sometimes 20+ times in a single day.

Note: We have the global setting rebaseWhen disabled, so the "force-push spam" (at least in the buildah case) is unlikely related to main movement.

[github-actions]

Successfully triggered github-actions/success task to indicate successful run of cirrus-ci_retrospective integration and unit testing from this PR's 6dfadc42d5b0057e0d8327f8785de1aba46cb313.

[cevich]

Note: There may be existing discussions on this topic upstream. I haven't had a chance to look/search.

[Luap99]

I have not looked if the changes itself look right in the yaml but I like the idea.
Currently there are a lot of rebases on these PRs, it is especially annoying if there are like 3 update PRs then I merge the first one and the other two get rebased even if there was no conflict. While rebasing is a good idea in general I agree that it is to much at the moment.

Now one thing I do not get is where is the timing coming from, i.e. what timezone is this based on? I go over my GH stuff first thing in the morning and start merging these renovate PRs if they are green and I do this before 11 am my timezone and thus before UTC and east cost time so I don't think this will help me personally.

Ideally there would be a option to say lets rebase once a day max or when there is a conflict so it would not depend on the time.

[cevich]

@Luap99 clarification re: rebasing. It's suppose to be disabled (i.e. no rebasing by default) in the shared config. Then individual repos. can enable it if needed (IIRC c/images and c/skopeo turn it on).

What I've seen cause force-push spam, is actual upstream package updates (even very minor ones). The only way I know to limit that is by hour + by schedule 😕

The timezone is configured to UTC. For the schedule strings, I pulled the times from my posterior. I didn't try to pick anything specific, nor try to guess when would be good. If you think there's a better schedule that would work for the team, please let me know.

[cevich]

The update spam seems to have mostly abated w/o this fix.