Comment by megous

Yes, you risk reputation and still need to be careful. One way to try to mitigate is to write tests. Which is what rsync project is doing, too. But there's only so much you can catch alone.

And BTW, you're not distributing to millions of people as an author of the code.

There are distributions maintainers between you and the world, which can also intervene, and are responsible for what they distribute, build testing on many configurations/architectures/versions - and can decide to revert to protect users, etc. And often do.

FOSS authors themselves can't be expected to keep around outdated systems from 5 years ago just to test build compatibility, in 8 different architectures that someone may want to build their code with.

Very few projects have as comprehensive testsuite as say sqlite. You can never cover everyting, so the beauty of FOSS is that someone will come and tell you and send you a fix for their special system, and now everything is again fine for that one special person, or distro maintainer.