Custom checkboxes incompatible with renovatebot generated PR

[stefanochang]

Tell us more.

Goal

Our goal at Turo is to extend the renovatebot generated PR by appending a set of checkboxes in the PR footer, these custom checkboxes would be managed by checkmate to ensure they are not ignored by the developers.
We have the default settings for the renovatebot rebase operation, and the bottom snippet of our PR description looks like this

---

 - [ ] <!-- rebase-check -->If you want to rebase/retry this PR, check this box

---

Sandboxes (select 1)

<!--Checkmate select=1-->
- [ ] These changes do not affect sandboxes
- [ ] I have tested my changes in a sandbox: PASTE YOUR SBX PR HERE
<!--renovate-debug:eyJjcmVhdGVkSW5WZXIiOiIzNS4xNTkuNyIsInVwZGF0ZWRJblZlciI6IjM1LjE1OS43IiwidGFyZ2V0QnJhbmNoIjoibWFpbiJ9-->

Problem

We have successfully added the checkboxes to the footer, however the problem we're seeing is when a developer checks our custom checkboxes, it triggers renovate bot to regenerate the description (screenshot below shows to demonstrate action that triggers PR regeneration)

Desired Behavior

The desired behavior is that renovate bot will not regenerate the PR if the checkboxes checked were not created by renovatebot, looking at the code it appears that the intention was for renovatebot to only rebase if the rebase specific checkbox was checked, specifically this prefix

 <!-- rebase-check -->

[rarkins]

Which platform are you using? GitHub, GitLab, etc

And how exactly are you running Renovate, if it's self-hosted?

[stefanochang]

Hi, we're running it in github and we're just calling the public renovatebot GHA here

[rarkins]

Does checking the checkbox really "trigger" anything or do you mean that the next time renovate runs on the repo it resets the PR description back to the original? I suspect this has nothing to do with checkboxes and instead relates to any change you could make to the PR body

[stefanochang]

Hi, yeah so we have an action that detects any changes to the pr description and will call the renovatebot GHA

on:
  pull_request:
    edited

Our thought was that since nothing related to what renovatebot cares about changed (ie. the rebase checkbox wasn't checked) it shouldn't cause renovatebot to renegerate the PR. This essentially means that we cannot add checkboxes to the renovatebot generated PR.

[viceice]

• PR body: use html delimiters to allow appending or prepending to content #28933

[rarkins]

Yes, I think that's the way. Then the checkboxes can be placed after Renovate's delimiter and it will ignore it