[rleigh]

When I was maintaining sysvinit and initscripts, and testing changes to these, as well as initramfs, lvm, and all other associated packages critical to booting, that's exactly what I did.

Before upload of every single release, it would have been tested on a battery of virtual machines using various different configurations, plus bare metal including non-x86 architectures (powerpc at the time). That was sufficient to catch the vast majority of regressions upon common and not-so-common setups. When a single mistake could effectively brick thousands of installations, you do have a responsibility and duty of care to not ever break system boot.