This is indeed what's missing from the ecosystem at large. People seem to be under the impression that if a new release of software/library/OS/application is released, you need to move to it today. They don't seem to actually look through the changes, only doing that if anything breaks, and then proceed to upgrade because "why not" or "it'll only get harder in the future", neither which feel like solid choices considering the trade-offs.
While we've seen to already have known that it introduces massive churn and unneeded work, it seems like we're waking up to the realization that it is a security tradeoff as well, to stay at the edge of version numbers. Sadly, not enough tooling seems to take this into account (yet?).
Most tooling (e.g. Dependabot) allows you to set an interval between version checks. What more could be done on that front exactly? Devs can already choose to check less frequently.
EDIT: Github supports this scenario too (as mentioned in the article):
https://github.blog/changelog/2025-07-01-dependabot-supports...
https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/dependabot/working-...
The whole premise of the article is that they’re substantially lower, because some time for the ecosystem of dependency scanners and users to detect and report is better than none.
I had not seen that tool. Thanks for pointing it out.
that's generally true, no?
of course waiting a few days/weeks should be the minimum unless there's a CVE (or equivalent) that's applies
I think I wouldn't object to "Dependabot on a 2-week delay" as something that at least flags. However working in Go more than anything else it was often the case even so that dependency alerts were just an annoyance if they aren't tied to a security issue or something. Dynamic languages and static languages do not have the same risk profiles at all. The idea that some people have that all dependencies are super vital to update all the time and the casual expectation of a constant stream of vital security updates is not a general characteristic of programming, it is a specific characteristic not just of certain languages but arguably the community attached to those languages.
(What we really need is capabilities, even at a very gross level, so we can all notice that the supposed vector math library suddenly at version 1.43.2 wants to add network access, disk reading, command execution, and cryptography to the set of things it wants to do, which would raise all sorts of eyebrows immediately, even perhaps in an automated fashion. But that's a separate discussion.)
Doing updates on a regular basis (weekly to monthly) seems like a good idea so you don't forget how to do them and the work doesn't pile up. Also, it's easier to debug a problem when there are fewer changes at once.
But they could be rescheduled depending on what else is going on.
This lessens, but doesn't eliminate supply side vulns. You can still get a vulnerable new release if your schedule happens to land just after the vuln lands.
TFA proposes a _delay_ in a particular dependency being pulled in. You can still update every day/hour/microsecond if you want, you just don't get the "new" thing until it's baked a bit.
What would happen from time to time was that an important reason did come up, but the team was now many releases behind. Whoever was unlucky enough to sign up for the project that needed the updated dependency now had to do all those updates of the dependency, including figuring out how they affected a bunch of software that they weren't otherwise going to work on. (e.g., for one code path, I need a bugfix that was shipped three years ago, but pulling that into my component affects many other code paths.) They now had to go figure out what would break, figure out how to test it, etc. Besides being awful for them, it creates bad incentives (don't sign up for those projects; put in hacks to avoid having to do the update), and it's also just plain bad for the business because it means almost any project, however simple it seems, might wind up running into this pit.
I now think of it this way: either you're on the dependency's release train or you jump off. If you're on the train, you may as well stay pretty up to date. It doesn't need to be every release the minute it comes out, but nor should it be "I'll skip months of work and several major releases until something important comes out". So if you decline to update to a particular release, you've got to ask: am I jumping off forever, or am I just deferring work? If you think you're just deferring the decision until you know if there's a release worth updating to, you're really rolling the dice.
(edit: The above experience was in Node.js. Every change in a dynamically typed language introduces a lot of risk. I'm now on a team that uses Rust, where knowing that the program compiles and passes all tests gives us a lot of confidence in the update. So although there's a lot of noise with regular dependency updates, it's not actually that much work.)
That's been my experience as well. In addition, the ecosystem largely holds to semver, which means a non-major upgrade tends to be painless, and conversely, if there's a major upgrade, you know not to put it off for too long because it'll involve some degree of migration.
Although this is true, any large ecosystem will have some popular packages not holding to semver properly. Also, the biggest downside is when your `>=v1` depends - indirectly usually - on a `v0` dependency which is allowed to do breaking changes.
While my recent legacy Java project migration from JDK 8 -> 21 & a ton of dependency upgrades has been a pretty smooth experience so far.
I'd prefer to upgrade around the time most of the nasty surprises have already been discovered by somebody else, preferably with workarounds developed.
At the same time, you don't want to be so far back that upgrading uncovers novel migration problems, or issues that nobody else cares about anymore.
I don't like Java but sometimes I envy their ecosystem.
Plus you can find endless stream of experienced devs for it. Which are more stable job wise than those who come & go every 6-12 months. Stability. Top management barely cares for anything else from IT.
E.g. something like:
pkg_staleness = (1 * missed_patch + 5 * missed_minor + 10 * missed_major) * (month_diff(installed_release_date, latest_release_date)/2)^2
proj_staleness = sum(pkg.staleness * pkg.weight for pkg in all_packages)If you break my code I'm not wasting time fixing what you broke, I'm fixing the root cause of the bug: finding your replacement.
For instance if you use a package that provides a calendar widget and your app uses only the “western” calendar and there is a critical vulnerability that only manifests in the Islamic calendar, you have zero reason to worry about an exploit.
I see this as a reasonable stance.
I don’t think this is specific to any one language or environment, it just gets more difficult the larger your project is and the longer you go without updating dependencies.
I’ve experienced this with NPM projects, with Android projects, and with C++ (neglecting to merge upstream changes from a private fork).
It does seem likely that dynamic languages make this problem worse, but I don’t think very strict statically typed languages completely avoid it.
(Literally at one place we built a SPA frontend that was embedded in the device firmware as a static bundle, served to the client and would then talk to a small API server. And because these NodeJS types liked to have libraries reused for server and frontend, we would get endless "vulnerability reports" - but all of this stuff only ever ran in the clients browser!)
In the end, I decided to implement a lightweight PHP 5 relay to translate SQL requests so the MSSQL server could still be accessed. The university stuffs were quite satisfied with my work. But I really felt guilty for the next guy who will touch this setup. So I still didn’t quite make it back onto the release train… as that PHP 5 relay counts.
The practical problem with this is that many large organizations have a security/infosec team that mandates a "zero CVE" posture for all software.
Where I work, if our infosec team's scanner detect a critical vulnerability in any software we use, we have 7 days to update it. If we miss that window we're "out of compliance" which triggers a whole process that no one wants to deal with.
The path of least resistance is to update everything as soon as updates are available. Consequences be damned.
The solution is to fire those teams.
What you should do instead is talk with them about SLAs and validation. For example, commit to patching CRITICAL within x days, HIGH with y, etc. but also have a process where those can be cancelled if the bug can be shown not to be exploitable in your environment. Your CISO should be talking about the risk of supply chain attacks and outages caused by rushed updates, too, since the latter are pretty common.
Let's say the reg says you're liable for damages caused by software defects you ship due to negligence, giving you broad leeway how to mitigate risks. The corporate policy then says "CVEs with score X must be fixed in Y days; OWASP best practices; infrastructure audits; MFA; yadda yadda". Finally the enforcement is then done by automated tooling like sonarqube, prisma. dependabot, burpsuite, ... and any finding must be fixed with little nuance because the people doing the scans lack the time or expertise to assess whether any particular finding is actually security-relevant.
On the ground the automated, inflexible enforcement and friction then leads to devs choosing approaches that won't show up in scans, not necessarily secure ones.
As an example I witnessed recently: A cloud infra scanning tool highlighted that an AppGateway was used as TLS-terminating reverse proxy, meaning it used HTTP internally. The tool says "HTTP bad", even when it's on an isolated private subnet. But the tool didn't understand Kubernetes clusters, so a a public unencrypted ingress, i.e. public HTTP didn't show up. The former was treated as a critical issue that must be fixed asap or the issue will get escalated up the management chain. The latter? Nobody cares.
Another time I got pressure to downgrade from Argon2 to SHA2 for password hashing because Argon2 wasn't on their whitelist. I resisted that change but it was a stressful bureaucratic process with some leadership being very unhelpful and suggesting "can't you just do the compliant thing and stop spending time on this?".
So I agree with GP that some security teams barely correlate with security, sometimes going into the negative. A better approach would to integrate software security engineers into dev teams, but that'd be more expensive and less measurable than "tool says zero CVEs".
So it's more of a cost-cutting/cover-your-ass measure than an actual requirement.
We had like 1 or 2 crash-patches in the past - Log4Shell was one of them, and blocking an API no matter what in a component was another one.
In a lot of other cases, you could easily wait a week or two for directly customer facing things.
Come 2027-12, the Cyber Resilience Act enters full enforcement. The CRA mandates a "duty of care" for the product's lifecycle, meaning if a company blindly updates a dependency to clear a dashboard and ships a supply-chain compromise, they are on the hook for fines up to €15M or 2.5% of global turnover.
At that point, yes, there is a sense in which the blind update strategy you described becomes a legal liability. But don't miss the forest for the trees, here. Most software companies are doing zero vetting whatsoever. They're staring at the comet tail of an oncoming mass extinction event. The fact that you are already thinking in terms of "assess impact" vs. "blindly patch" already puts your workplace significantly ahead of the market.
Browsers get a lot of unknown input, so they have to update often.
A Weather app is likely to only get input from one specific site (controlled by the app developers), so it should be relatively safe.
Yes
"Only then do you need to update that specific dependency right away."
Big no. If you do that it is guaranteed one day you miss a vulnerability that hurts you.
To frame it differently: What you propose sounds good in theory but in practice the effort to evaluate vulnerabilities against your product will be higher than the effort to update plus taking appropriate measures against supply chain attacks.
Most of them assume what if they are working on some public accessible website then 99% of the people and orgs in the world are running nothing but some public accessible website.
Dependencies are good. Churn is bad.
Nobody is proposing a system that utterly and completely locks you out of all updates if they haven't aged enough. There is always going to be an override switch.