[laurowyn]

Why not think of it a different way; why do we need to put up with breaking changes at all?

I'd much rather stand up a replacement system adjacent to the current one, and then switch over, than run the headache of debugging breaking changes every single release.

To me, this is the difference between an update and an upgrade. An update just fixes things that are broken. And upgrade adds/removes/changes features from how they were before.

I'm all for keeping things up to date. And software vendors should support that as much as possible. But forcing me to deal with a new set of challenges every few weeks is ridiculous.

This idea of rapid releases with continuous development is great when that's the fundamental point of the product. But stability is a feature too, and a far more important one in my opinion. I'd much rather a stable platform to build upon, than a rickety one that keeps changing shape every other week that I need to figure out what changed and how that impacts my system, because it means I can spend all of my time _using_ the platform rather than fixing it.

This is why bleeding edge releases exist. For people who want the latest and greatest, and are willing to deal with the instability issues and want to help find and squash bugs. For the rest of us, we just want to use the system, not help develop it. Give me a stable system, ship me bug fixes that don't fundamentally break how anything works, and let me focus on my specific task. If that costs money, so be it, but I don't want to have to take one day per week running updates to find something else is broken and have to debug and fix it. That's not what I'm here to do.

And as for cleaning the house - we always have the option of hiring a cleaner. That costs us money, but they keep the house cleanliness stable whilst we focus on something else to make enough money to cover the cleaner's cost plus some profit.

[dpoloncsak]

I assume the cost of duplicating every piece of infra we have to create a suitable 'replacement system' would cost more than the impact the few times we have had downtime due to breaking changes in updates. Ymmv ofc

[JackSlateur]

Because many components are "all or nothing"

And also because, for the others, you have to migrate everybody from the "old" to the "new"; Large project, low value, nobody cares, "just to your job and don't bother us with your shit"