> Over time, though, version pinning builds up technical debt. You have software locked to old unmaintained versions of packages.
If you are talking about open source, it is not a problem: anyone can upgrade dependencies and make a pull request. Without version pinning, the project will always be in a "broken" state.
For example, recently I tried to run Firefox 3.5 on linux and it crashed with modern versions of gobject libraries although they are supposed to be backwards-compatible. I wish Debian package manager allowed to install an old version of a library specially for this application.
If you are talking about open source, it is not a problem: anyone can upgrade dependencies and make a pull request. Without version pinning, the project will always be in a "broken" state.
For example, recently I tried to run Firefox 3.5 on linux and it crashed with modern versions of gobject libraries although they are supposed to be backwards-compatible. I wish Debian package manager allowed to install an old version of a library specially for this application.