Debian developers have announced that Debian 13 has entered the hard freeze stage before its release, during which the transfer of key packages and packages without autopkgtests from unstable to testing is completely halted, and the phase of intensive testing and fixing blocking release issues has begun. The hard freeze stage is considered a necessary intermediate step before the full freeze covering all packages. The full freeze will occur a few weeks before the release, which is expected in the summer. Currently, there are 244 critical release-blocking bugs (when transitioning to the hard freeze, Debian 12 had 258 such bugs).
This is the third freeze stage — the first stage was completed on March 15 and led to the cessation of 'transitions' (package updates that require dependency adjustments from other packages, resulting in the temporary removal of packages from Testing), as well as the halt of updates for packages necessary for building (build-essential). The second stage began on April 15 and involved stopping the acceptance of new source packages and closing the possibility of reintegrating previously removed packages.
The report from the team responsible for Debian release management also announced the decision to cease the official release formation of Debian 13 for the MIPS64EL platform. Meanwhile, the RISC-V 64 platform has been added to the officially supported platforms, which has been decided to be included in Debian 13.
Source: opennet.ru
