There's a judgment call to be made on a per-package basis:

And my pet peeve: dependencies on libraries that have major version
bumps way too often.  If a library is fairly stable, 'make replace' of
it will succeed and seem like a sane thing to do when it has an
upgrade.  Upgrades for libiconv (recently) and gettext (earlier) were
substantially more troublesome, although for the most part 'make
update' just worked.

-- 
        Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com>