Use branch automerge strategy

[pat-s]

Strategy description:

• Renovate first creates a branch and no PR
• If tests pass, Renovate pushes a commit directly to the base branch without PR
• If tests fail, Renovate raises a PR for you to review

Major updates are never automerged.

Source: https://docs.renovatebot.com/noise-reduction/#branch-automerging

[qwerty287]

Major go dependency updates shouldn't be automerged if the import paths were changed (e.g. github.com/x/y/v1 -> github.com/x/y/v2`) because renovate can't handle this.

Unfortunately the ci checks pass in this case. Can we prevent this?

[pat-s]

Major deps are should never get automerged as we have "automergeMajor": false, set.

Can you show a PR where this happened? I only found the "non-major golang deps" ones which look good to me (e.g. woodpecker-ci/woodpecker#2566).

[qwerty287]

See e.g. woodpecker-ci/woodpecker#2573

Check what renovate did (first commit) and what I had to do to fix this manually (second commit)

[pat-s]

This is a major update and wouldn't have been automerged.

Not all updates work OOB and this is more often to happen for major ones anyhow. Not sure if the manual work done by you is a one time fix or would be required next time again (for this I am not enough of an expert on go). I also can't see if the CI of the first commit succeeded (it's yellow and I'm on the phone).

But WRT to your initial comment about potential automerges which don't work: I think for golang, as long as the tests work it should be fine? I.e. due to the coverage, CI should always fail if there really is an issue - shouldn't it?

[qwerty287]

But WRT to your initial comment about potential automerges which don't work: I think for golang, as long as the tests work it should be fine? I.e. due to the coverage, CI should always fail if there really is an issue - shouldn't it?

Not if there's a change to import path after a major upgrade (which is excluded anyways, so my issue no longer applies).

In these cases, renovate just appends the new dependency path to go.mod but does not do anything else. This is useless and does not actually update it. Renovate opens a new PR after this which does update the original dep and there it also fails.

[pat-s]

If this is a specific issue with major upgrades, I guess something can/should be done on the renovate side then.
Maybe somebody already reported it?

The only thing I am concerned about is if something would be merged which causes an issue/does not work. Imperfect updates of certain deps are not great but something we/you can easily workaround.

But thanks for asking and for the approval! Let's see how it goes, I have great hopes that it will help in a good way.

[pat-s]

@anbraten could you activate the renovate-approve bot for all repos in the org?

[qwerty287]

If this is a specific issue with major upgrades, I guess something can/should be done on the renovate side then.
Maybe somebody already reported it?

Yes: renovatebot/renovate#21010

[anbraten]

@anbraten could you activate the renovate-approve bot for all repos in the org?

How do I have to do this again 😅

[anbraten]

Should be adjusted now