Evolving the API is a fact of life. It your critical program breaks with the most current bleeding-edge version, then either fix it (or have your vendor do it for you) or don't run the latest release. It's not like someone will die for having an earlier release.

That's also why Linux distros don't use the latest kernels: to allow the userland programs they package into them to run until they get fixed and the latest kernel can be added. While I know my Ubuntu doesn't run yesterday's kernel, I am happy it runs perfectly well with last month's kernel.