Decrease Renovate Frequency

Hey repo folks 👋, I’m very thankful we have bots automating some mundane tasks like updating dependency semvers. However, the frequency of these updates is causing micro delays (a minute a week maybe) and not very beneficial for the health of our system.

Suggestion

To increase the usefulness of this bot, and be considerate of our time, I suggest we change the frequency of Renovate (renovate.json) to once a quarter:

{
  "schedule": ["every 3 months on the first day of the month"]
}

https://docs.renovatebot.com/configuration-options/#schedule

That way we can ensure we have healthy dependencies and reduce GitHub notifications. At least let’s try it for a bit?

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@JustinBeckwith @ace-n

Original PR: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/nodejs-docs-samples/pull/778

[ace-n]

I can’t speak for @grant here, but personally - these notifications usually require some amount context-switching. (Not that they always do, since GitHub doesn’t require each product owner to sign off on these updates [though I wish it did].)

If I can approve them in a batch (or better yet, at some defined time(s) within the week/month/year), that’s O(1) context switches - if I can’t, then it’s O(n).

[fhinkel]

I’m stronlgy in favor of updating dependencies as soon as there are updates available. @grant maybe you need to change your notification settings.