Renovate removes GitLab approval rules independently of automerge option

[viceice]

Discussed in #31353

^{Originally posted by nc-igad September 12, 2024}

What would you like help with?

I think I found a bug

How are you running Renovate?

Self-hosted

If you're self-hosting Renovate, tell us which platform (GitHub, GitLab, etc) and which version of Renovate.

GitLab

Please tell us more about your question or problem

Hi!
We recently upgraded our renovate version. After the upgrade, we saw that renovate started removing the approval rules on all merge requests independently of the value of automerge.

The issue occurs starting from v37.421.7, I think this was introduced by this code change #29972.

Example project configuration
The renovate.json file of the project looks similar to this:

{
  "platformAutomerge": true,
  "gitLabIgnoreApprovals": true,
  "automergeType": "pr",
  "packageRules": [
    {
      "matchPackageNames": ["/azure/"],
      "automerge": true,
    }
  ]
}

Expected behavior
Renovate removes the approval rules on the new merge requests for azure packages only as automerge is enabled for them. All other merge requests are created with the projects default approval rules.

Actual behavior
Renovate creates the new merge requests and removes the approval rules on all of them.