Having used first greenkeeper and then dependabot in dozens of projects, they can indeed help a bit. But mostly by just spreading the workload across time. So if you do you weekly "check all dependency update PRs", then maybe your repo is ready to go the next time you want to do actual work on it. But honestly, even that weekly workload is a lot.
@bergie I guess I haven’t worked on any HUGE projects using these, so you may know more than I do. So far though my experience with renovate is that the hardest part is for someone to remember to click the approval button every so often otherwise the PRs back up. Occasionally there is a major package upgrade that requires some code adjustments. And also there are sometimes some packages that fail pnpm’s trust requirements that require some examination. Other than that I greatly prefer amortizing the effort over time than waiting for things to pile up.
bergie
Yeah, it is certainly the better approach. However, since we're busy sailing I'm trying to reduce busywork (and get my software to be more "permanent"). And for that we need to reduce and get rid of any external dependencies we can.
@bergie I guess the average developer toolchain isn’t really made for developing on boats, so great call there. 😆