Best Practice for arbitrarily ignoring certain updates?

[chris-dura]

What is the best practice for ignoring MRs for packages you DO NOT want to upgrade (usually MAJOR versions)... but you will eventually?

Here is an example of what I mean...

• My package.json currently has "sass-loader": "^8.0.0"
• The latest sass-loader is 11.x
• sass-loader@11.x wants a minimum version of webpack@5.x
• However, a lot of the other packages I use want to stay on webpack@4.x
• So, I don't really want to update sass-loader just because there's a newer version
• I'd much rather wait until I know the other "more important" packages work with webpack@5 and won't break...

So, currently, I'm just manually upgrading dependencies, so I just keep a log of which dependencies I do not want to update for one reason or another. Since (I assume) Renovate is going to create an MR for sass-loader to update to 11.x... having an MR sitting there is going to be a lot more tempting for a Maintainer to possibly merge it, without understanding that we actually DID NOT want to upgrade that... yet.

The docs are expansive, so I wasn't sure if there was an elegant way to "manage" this in Renovate (beyond just using ignoreDeps)?

I guess I'm looking for an "ignore until something else happens" functionality... like a way to configure Renovate to "only open MRs for dependencies that have compatible sub-dependencies in the same MAJOR version range"??

If I just use ignoreDeps... any suggestions on a way to document WHY those are ignored for future Maintainers? (other than just dropping it in the README.md 😆)

[viceice]

Use dependency dashboard approval.

So you see all updates in one issue and can approve when you are ready.

Approval requirement can be assigned via package rules.

[rarkins]

Instead of ignoreDeps you could write a package rule for each and use the "description" field. Check out this rule we use as an example of something similar: https://github.com/renovatebot/.github/blob/cf278491c92f78960db271c34d58522051aedfc3/default.json#L19-L25

[chris-dura]

Thanks, the description field is a nice way to document "inline"!