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by esafak 479 days ago
It does help, because major version updates are more likely to cause breakage than minor ones, so you benefit if you wait for a few minor version updates. That is not to say minor versions can't introduce bugs.

Windows is a well-known example; people used to wait for a service pack or two before upgrading.

2 comments

We could even wait for a patch version or the minor being out a certain amount of time. For a major I'd wait even longer and potentially for a second patch.
And then they went towards a more evergreen update strategy, causing some major outages when some releases caused issues.

I mean evergreen releases make sense imo, as the overhead of maintaining older versions for a long time is huge, but you need to have canary releases, monitoring, and gradual rollout plans; for something like Windows, this should be done with a lot of care. Even a 1% release rate will affect hundreds of thousands if not millions of systems.