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Surely it would be no problem to give developers a second machine for the testing period, so they could work with that one every day and if it breaks, the stable one is just one git checkout away...

But no, I've actually never seen this. Probably better to lose people who leave over their employer messing up the work hardware than spending 3k per 2-3 years for a second machine.

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Extending the metaphor with this behavior, it'd be like mainly feeding your dog store-bought food, and occasionally lining up a bowl of home-made. It might sometimes eat it, but you wouldn't know.

Not all software is easily dogfoodable.

A funny incident:

There's a git forge called https://ayllu-forge.org/ that they use to develop itself.

`git clone` had broken, and it hadn't been fixed because the developers had already cloned the code.

Yes that might actually help, but I can imagine the cost/benefit analysis being difficult to pull off: the costs are very real, but the benefits are less tangible. To be clear, I don't know of anyone who left because of a bad upgrade. I think a lot of folks just ran like I did, hopping from LTS to LTS after the point release (or only once their LTS was nearing EOL).

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