> In the extreme I think there's a decent chance projects like Debian might have to radically overhaul or just shut down completely - the whole philosophy of slow and steady with old code just won't work.
It may actually be the opposite.
Debians steady and professional approach on shipping security patches with very little to no functional difference actually enables us to consider and work on automated, autonomous weekly or faster patches of the entire fleet. And once that's in place and trusted, emergency rollouts are very possible and easy.
We have other projects that "move fast and break things" and ship whatever they want in whatever versions they want and those will require constant attention to ship any update for a security topic. These projects require constant human attention to work through their shenanigans to keep them up to date.
Not only that but debian has for example, debsecan so you can see on any system what CVEs exist and if your packages are patched. ex from my system I ran it and got
> CVE-2026-32105 xrdp
which i see has a fix in sid but not on bookworm