The Debian developers have announced that they have reached the first stage of the freeze of the Debian 12 "Bookworm" package base, which implies the termination of "transitions" (package updates that require fixing dependencies of other packages, which leads to the temporary removal of packages from Testing), as well as the termination of package updates, necessary for the build (build-essential).
On February 12, 2023, a transition to a soft freeze of the package base is planned, which will stop accepting new source packages and close the possibility of re-enabling previously deleted packages.
On March 12, 2023, a hard freeze is planned before the release, during which the process of transferring key packages and packages without autopkgtests from unstable to testing will be completely stopped and the stage of intensive testing and fixing problems blocking the release will begin. The hard freeze stage is introduced for the first time and is considered as a necessary intermediate step before a full freeze, covering all packages. The time of complete freezing has not yet been precisely 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). Debian 12 is expected to be released in summer 2023.
Source: opennet.ru