I have been running a few discourse sites for some time now and I have a number of scripts that interact directly with some of Discourse’s APIs and I find that periodically things just stop working after an upgrade. Generally this is fine if the things are detectable immediately but when they don’t show up for a bit of time it becomes difficult to chase things down and often results in production issues rather than dev instances.
For example: Recurring events in Upcoming Events calendar fail to handle daylight saving change
Recently removed the include_expired option, unfortunately the behavior of only having events returned from the calendar API that are not expired was something I relied on and it caused a number of processes to blow up at a later date after upgrading. For this particular example failing if a caller specified the now removed parameter would have at least stopped the issue in my particular script 
So what I am wondering is as a downstream user of discourse what is the best way to identify API changes like this before they hit my instance? Previously I resorted to mirroring the discourse-calendar repo and upgrading it less frequently on my own time to avoid these problems, now that it is integrated I decided to drop that approach and I am being bit again.
I appreciate all the work and improvement discourse constantly goes under and I am fine if the answer is “sign up for enterprise and these things will happen less frequently,” or add more testing on your end but I wanted to see if maybe there are other options or approaches I am unaware of.
Thank you.