Group minor updates with patch updates in Renovate

[trask]

Renovate now groups minor updates into the same weekly PR as patch updates, instead of opening a separate PR for every minor release. Today each minor release lands on its own the moment it ships, which produced 27 ungrouped PRs in the last 90 days.

Two dependencies show the cost clearly: checkstyle went 13.5 through 13.9 as five separate PRs, and com.diffplug.spotless went 8.6 through 8.10 as five more. Under this rule each of those would have been folded into the weekly group.

This matches what opentelemetry-java already does. Major updates are unaffected and still get their own PR.

OpenTelemetry artifacts are excluded from the group. They keep arriving individually and immediately, which is what dogfooding and cascaded releases need, and that applies to their patch updates as well.

The exclusion needs both patterns: io.opentelemetry** covers every OpenTelemetry Maven group id, and open-telemetry/** covers GitHub-sourced dependencies such as open-telemetry/semantic-conventions.

otel/weaver and other OpenTelemetry Docker images stay in the group, because they are test infrastructure rather than cascaded releases.

The 'flint-managed linter updates' minors will also fold into the weekly group, because this repo's packageRules are applied after the grafana/flint preset.

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Updates Renovate’s dependency grouping so that minor updates are bundled into the existing weekly “patch updates” group PR, reducing PR noise while keeping major updates separate.

Changes:

• Expanded the weekly grouped Renovate rule from patch-only to include minor updates.
• Updated the group name/comment to reflect the broader grouping.

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[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Copilot reviewed 1 out of 1 changed files in this pull request and generated no new comments.

Suppressed comments (1)

.github/renovate.json5:27

• matchPackageNames does not support ! negation, so this rule likely won’t match anything and the weekly patch/minor grouping won’t apply. Use Renovate’s exclusion fields instead, e.g. excludePackagePatterns, and express the exclusions as regex/prefix patterns.

      matchPackageNames: [
        '!io.opentelemetry**',
        '!open-telemetry/**',
      ],

[trask]

Reopened from a fork branch as #564. Same commits and the same diff; the head branch just lives on my fork now instead of upstream.