The Grumpy Editor's guide to (some) development distributions

An soname change may be impossible in a particular release of a stable distribution, but there
have been rather a lot of soname changes in "Debian stable" over the years. Of course, this
only happens at a new release, but that tends to make release times especially tricky. This is
particularly true because stable distribution upgrades are a rare enough event that the
procedures are never sufficiently carefully tested to be a suitable operation to perform on a
stable system.

The Gentoo mechanism for the stable version is pretty much unique in that you can run a system
forever without ever doing anything that's either beyond end-of-life or is outside of the
normal update process, whereas other systems require an upgrade, outside of the normal
process, eventually. Of course, the actual Gentoo "stable" distribution doesn't necessarily
avoid causing occasional breakage, but that's an implementation issue rather than a design
issue.