Debian developers have announced the achievement of the first stage of the freeze for Debian 12 "Bookworm," which implies the cessation of "transitions" (package updates requiring adjustments to the dependencies of other packages, resulting in the temporary removal of packages from Testing) and the discontinuation of updates for packages necessary for building (build-essential).
On February 12, 2023, a transition to a soft freeze of the package base is scheduled, during which the acceptance of new source packages will stop and the possibility of re-adding previously removed packages will be closed.
A hard freeze is scheduled for March 12, 2023, during which the process of migrating key packages and packages without autopkgtests from unstable to testing will be completely stopped, and the phase of intensive testing and fixing release-critical issues will begin. This hard freeze stage is being introduced for the first time and is viewed as a necessary intermediate step before the complete freeze that will encompass all packages. The exact timing of the complete freeze is not yet determined.
Currently, there are 637 critical bugs blocking the release (at the time of the freeze in Debian 11, there were 472 such bugs; in Debian 10 — 577; in Debian 9 — 275; Debian 8 — 350; Debian 7 — 650). The release of Debian 12 is expected in the summer of 2023.
Source: opennet.ru
