Of course updates need to be consecutively applied, but we don't have to force them on the user when they're released. We also don't have to force unrelated upd

Of course updates need to be consecutively applied, but we don't have to force them on the user when they're released. We also don't have to force unrelated updates when they only want an update for one specific package (dependencies forgiving, of course) Is this not how things are managed on basically every Linux distro? That's just concerning OS updates but it sounds like you're asking about a piece of software that is something entirely different. From my understanding, a good practice is to have all minor updates be compatible and only break that on a new major release. So don't make evey update a major release, doing that is actively hostile to users.