And I, personally, would want an email from aforesaid manager telling me not to do any upgrades, which I would print out in several copies and put in a secure place....
<snip>
You do not understand the situation I presented. This is about avoiding a situation where in a highly complex envirnoment, due to a quirk in one of the dozens of tools involved in designing your product, the product suddenly changes because libc was updated to a newer rev. So you keep your design environment static - all parts of it. We're talking business process here, not some stand-alone, uninformed PHB decision.