The suggested options, if I comprehend you properly, are A) Stick with the version you originally programmed against and B) Analyze the overall diff between versions if upgrading.
New features/improvements provide an incentive to not choose Option A. With regard to Option B: Although Backbone may be compact and easy to comprehend, the code calling it is much larger. Analyzing Backbone's changes and factoring in all code that calls it is a difficult and error prone process - laregly due to the dynamic nature of the language and lack of tooling for refactoring.
Two changes that bit us from 0.9.2->0.9.10 were model.set no longer accepting a model and, instead, requiring model.attributes (not a big deal, as it threw an exception and was immediately noticeable). The second issue, with collection.fetch, was a silent failure (I forget the exact issue, but the solution was providing two options, perhaps reset/update/add). Neither of these were documented in the changelogs.
It's not so much an issue of patching these breaking changes as it is knowing about them. Perhaps the ultimate issue here is our lack of adequate testing.
New features/improvements provide an incentive to not choose Option A. With regard to Option B: Although Backbone may be compact and easy to comprehend, the code calling it is much larger. Analyzing Backbone's changes and factoring in all code that calls it is a difficult and error prone process - laregly due to the dynamic nature of the language and lack of tooling for refactoring.
Two changes that bit us from 0.9.2->0.9.10 were model.set no longer accepting a model and, instead, requiring model.attributes (not a big deal, as it threw an exception and was immediately noticeable). The second issue, with collection.fetch, was a silent failure (I forget the exact issue, but the solution was providing two options, perhaps reset/update/add). Neither of these were documented in the changelogs.
It's not so much an issue of patching these breaking changes as it is knowing about them. Perhaps the ultimate issue here is our lack of adequate testing.