Doesn't this mean you're leaving yourself open to known vulnerabilities during that "cool down" time?
A sane "cooldown" is just for automated version updates relying on semantic versioning rules, which is a pretty questionable practice in the first place, but is indeed made a lot more safe this way.
You can still manually update your dependency versions when you learn that your code is exposed to some vulnerability that's purportedly been fixed. It's no different than manually updating your dependency version when you learn that there's some implementation bug or performance cliff that was fixed.
You might even still use an automated system to identify these kinds of "critical" updates and bring them to your attention, so that you can review them and can appropriately assume accountability for the choice to incorporate them early, bypassing the cooldown, if you believe that's the right thing to do.
Putting in that effort, having the expertise to do so, and assuming that accountability is kind of your "job" as a developer or maintainer. You can't just automate and delegate everything if you want people to be able to trust what you share with them.
There's no reason to pretend we live in a world where everyone is manually combing through the source of every dependency update.
I'm reminded of how new Setuptools versions are able to cause problems for so many people, basically because install tools default to setting up isolated build environments using the latest version of whatever compatible build backend is specified (which in turn defaults to "any version of Setuptools"). qv. my LWN article https://lwn.net/Articles/1020576/ .
The probability of introducing bugs is a function of the amount of development being done. Releasing less often doesn't change that. In fact, under that assumption, delaying releases strictly increases the amount of time users are affected by the average bug.
People who do this tell themselves the extra time allows them to catch more bugs. But in my experience that's a bedtime story, most bugs aren't noticed until after deployment anyway.
That's completely orthogonal to slowly rolling out changes, btw.
(This also doesn't apply to vulnerabilities per se, since known vulnerabilities typically aren't evaluated against cooldowns by tools like Dependabot.)
(Can you say more about what you found unclear in the post? The post definitely does not say "thou shall not update before the cooldown," the argument was that cooldowns are a great default. Engineers are fundamentally always expected to exercise discretion because, per the post, there's no single, sound, perfect solution to supply chain risks.)
^ This is what you wrote. I don't understand how that could possibly be interpreted any other way than I wrote above: an enforced delay on deploying the new code after upstream releases it.
> The post definitely does not say "thou shall not update before the cooldown," the argument was that cooldowns are a great default
Sorry, that is such a cop out. "I didn't actually mean you should do this, I mean you should consider if you should maybe do this and you are free to decide not to and don't argue with me if you disagree every case is different". Either take a stand or don't.
The argument advanced in the post is IMO clear: cooldowns are a sensible default to have, and empirically seem to be effective at mitigating the risk of compromised dependencies. I thought I took sufficient pains to be clear that they're not a panacea.
Me saying your proposed policy is bad is in no way predicated on any assumption you intended it to be "universal". Quite the opposite: the last thing anybody needs at work is yet another poorly justified bullshit policy they have to constantly request an "exception" to to do their job...