Pause execution on "inactive" repositories?

[TobiX]

In our company it happens often that people onboard renovate on a repository and later move on to other projects and just ignore any renovate interaction with the old repository... This creates quite a lot of unneeded work for renovate where no user reacts to anything renovate does. It would be nice if renovate could "pause" its work on repositories without "activity".

Aside: This might be hard to detect. On GitLab every project has a last_activity_at field, but that might include activity by "bots", so commits or issue edits by Renovate itself might count as "activity". Perhaps Renovate could keep track of the last time a user "interacted" with Renovate (merged/closed a MR, checked a checkbox in any issue/MR, etc.) and count that as "last activity".

[nabeelsaabna]

@TobiX is this issue a duplicate of #461 ?

[TobiX]

No, this describes a totally different scenario.

[TobiX]

Side-note: I think Dependabot implemented something similar recently, see for example jenkinsci/performance-plugin#260

Screenshot:

Probably as a measure to reduce load on their systems, but this has the side effect that

• No webhooks trigger for those branches/MRs
• No CI pipelines are started for those branches/MRs

Which seems like a net win for everybody involved.