Only consider updates for non-stale repos

[Alicipy]

Tell us more.

Hello,

I am working with some projects that have their last commit on the default branch from months ago, as we right now don't use them or have them not deployed. Right now, renovate tries to update them too, leading to a lot of PRs. We thought about archiving them, but hten they are not visible anymore, or we know that at 'some point' we will actively work with them again.

For that, I wanna suggest to have a flag for Renovate that only opens up new PRs or even closes existing ones when the last commit on the default branch is older than a time limit. This way, as soon as the repo is active again, also PRs would come in from Renovate, but as long as it is not touched, it stays there but in an unupdated state.

I would like your thoughts about that, if this is a good idea or you have other ideas or suggestions.
In case it is appreciated and wanted, I would take care of implementing this feature.

[rarkins]

I think this is a good idea, but it should be evaluated per-base branch. e.g. even if you have the default branch be a little stale, if you've configured Renovate to run on one or more other branches which aren't stale, then they should still be checked. I think we already check the last commit timestamp per base branch too.

For those who run Renovate on default branch only, it therefore wouldn't make any difference.

We can support the same duration syntax as is used in minimumReleaseAge.

It should work well with repositoryCache so that for repos which truly haven't changed, Renovate won't even need to git clone them in order to skip over.

[rarkins]

Converted to issue - PR welcome: #33986

[Alicipy]

Thanks a lot for your feedback and ideas, I think all points have a good point and should be implemented. I will start working on it.