pip-compile executing on every branch, every time

[sichapman]

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Other

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Self-hosted

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GitLab

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I assume this is intended behaviour but posting on the off chance it's not, or there's a way to configure around it.

The pip-compile manager executes pip-compile against every single pre-existing renovate/ branch whenever that repo is scanned. It's basically doing constant shadow lock file maintenance on every branch. As we have lots of Python apps this is adding lots of time onto our loops.

In my opinion, it should only execute when the branch has just been created or rebased. While it's theoretically nice to keep the transitive dependencies up to date if a branch ends up hanging around for a little while, it's almost certainly going to get rebased due to falling behind or having merge conflict anyway, and if it does get merged with a gone-slightly-out-of-date requirements.txt, that will soon get tidied up by the "proper" lock file maintenance. As it currently stands, it just adds extra time onto every single scan of the repo.

Logs (if relevant)

No response

[RahulGautamSingh]

With repositoryCache-enabled this should not happen as often, as the branch gets skipped if the upgrades are same. But, if the base branch changes frequently then even that won't help as much.

Only way I can think of reducing this is by doing rebaseWhen=behind-base-branch.

[sichapman]

I never even noticed repositoryCache (is there a list of recommend settings anywhere?), yes that has improved things alot, and should be useful overnight when branches can pile up without anyone around to merge.

Forcing behind-base-branch does not reduce the amount of pip-compile executions though. I don't mind p-c running if a rebase has actually occurred, since it's essentially a brand new commit. But running when nothing has changed seems wrong.