> Put another way, a sysadmin could feel confident that moving from 1.52->1.53 would be a painless and transparent operation This is what Semantic Versioning [

> Put another way, a sysadmin could feel confident that moving from 1.52->1.53 would be a painless and transparent operation This is what Semantic Versioning [1] aims to achieve, but as you highlighted, it still requires the maintainer(s) of the project to actually deliver stable software, regardless of what the version is. I think some people took "move fast and break things" a bit too literally. A project following SemVer and that has good automated test coverage is definitely on the right track though, and in generally should be a pretty safe upgrade (of course it's important to know their track record). "Move fast and break things ... in a separate branch with continuous integration running an extensive test suite" isn't quite as catchy but is what should be happening. [1] http://semver.org/ http://semver.org/