Feedback wanted: what stops you keeping Renovate updated?

[jamietanna]

As we receive feedback from our community, generally through Request Help, we pay attention to the versions of Renovate y'all are using when self-hosting Renovate.

We'd love to hear why you may be using older versions of Renovate.

In-scope:

• The frequency of Renovate updates
• The frequency of major version releases in Renovate
• Organisation difficulties with upgrading
  • (Share as much or as little as possible, but it would be useful to understand a little of why)
• Time constraints
  • I.e. "my team doesn't have time to keep this updated alongside everything else"
• Apathy/not feeling there's a need to keep updated
• Not knowing what it's worth upgrading for
• Not aware of security advisories or risks of using older Renovate versions

Out-of-scope:

• Not having a good dependency management tool to update your Renovate version (😜)

Other inputs are also very welcome - we're trying to get an understanding of what leads to this, and if there's anything we can to do improve the situation

Issues captured out of the discussion:

• docs: add an example / preset for "keeping Renovate updated" #41855

[chrede88]

I'm only speculating here as I try to keep renovate up-to-date, but I think the very high release cadence can end up deterring some users as the amount of time needed to keep up with the new releases can become to high.

[Peej11]

I try to keep Renovate (and everything else) as up to date as possible by using it. It's obviously very helpful for that purpose. The high release cadence is really the only sticking point but there are some ways to workaround it. Up until maybe a week or so ago I only did major/minor with no patch or sha pinning. This worked well and I'd only get an update every day or two normally. I recently updated all images to pin them with hashes so now I'm back to updating several times a day most days. I keep my sanity here now by just allowing it to automerge itself for patch and minor releases, but commit history still has a lot of activity to sort through if I need to go back and find something.

[viceice]

I usually update daily and sometimes on demand if I need a fix