[coherentpony]

> The notion of being able to fix an app by merely upgrading a library it depends on has not worked out in practice.

It works in practice if developers and maintainers adhere to semantic versioning. Unfortunately, there are numerous packages that don't adhere to this standard and that's when widespread breakage occurs.

[vidarh]

An example of where this has worked (though admittedly the reason it has continued to work as long as it has is that the size of the community has dwindled down to a very small, manageable number over the last 20 years) is AmigaOS, where there are 30 year old libraries that are still updated, and where the updates are still expected to be drop-in replacements for the previous version.

[zokier]

And if developers would just write bug-free code then also life would be much simpler. Sadly neither of these things is going to happen, so we need to deal with it somehow.