I've had breakages in Cygwin's emacs (missing GNUTLS dependency), Fedora's node.js (mismatched version of v8), GCC 4.7 (C++11 ABI regression, widely reported),

I've had breakages in Cygwin's emacs (missing GNUTLS dependency), Fedora's node.js (mismatched version of v8), GCC 4.7 (C++11 ABI regression, widely reported), Fedora 17's sssd (broke network login after upgrade), and perhaps most galling, Fedora 16's cron (which completely failed if you upgraded from 15). That's just in the past year. I don't think any of those packages are particularly niche or stale. I used to think maintainers were making miracles...now I think they're doing just OK.