Charles Marcus put forth on 6/15/2010 12:44 PM:
Waiting almost always keeps me from any major bugs from new packages (one exception was a minor update to mailman that changed directory locations), and still lets me stay up to date with the latest stable releases.
I waited "forever" to get hold of 1.2.10 in the form of the backport for Debian Lenny, which was the first 1.2.x backport available IIRC (I hate installing apps from source for many reasons). Once I installed it I almost immediately found problems with performance. I reported the symptoms here, and within a day or two Timo identified the cause relating to mbox processing and fixed it. It took a couple/three weeks IIRC before the 1.2.11 backport with this fix was available. I installed it and it fixed my problems instantly.
So, waiting a few days isn't always going to cut the mustard. Sometimes obscure problems may not surface for weeks or months. It seems I found this particular problem where others did not because my Dovecot server runs on really old "slow" CPUs. Others' have such stout CPUs that they just didn't notice the mbox processing slowdown.
I agree with Charles' logic in most cases, but as shown above, not all cases. In this case, my issue was laggy performance, not broken functionality. One can usually limp along with laggy performance for a while until a fix is available. Broken functionality issues are identified and fixed rather quickly as they usually hit multiple OPs simultaneously.
-- Stan