What is a "cooldown" period in Dependabot configuration, and why would you use one?

A cooldown option delays proposing an update for a newly released version until a specified amount of time has passed since its release — giving the broader community a window to discover and report problems with a brand-new release before your repository automatically adopts it.

updates:
  - package-ecosystem: "npm"
    directory: "/"
    schedule:
      interval: "daily"
    cooldown:
      default-days: 5

This directly addresses a real risk pattern: a package maintainer publishes a new version that turns out to have a bug or regression, discovered and reported by the wider community within hours or days — without a cooldown, an aggressively daily-checking Dependabot setup might have already opened (and potentially auto-merged) a PR adopting that flawed version before the problem was even known, whereas a several-day cooldown gives that issue a chance to surface and be caught first.

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