The Debian developers have announced that Debian 12 has been moved into a pre-release hard freeze, in which the process of migrating key packages and packages without autopkgtests from unstable to testing is completely halted and a phase of intensive testing and fixing issues blocking the release begins. The hard freeze step is considered to be a necessary intermediate step before a full freeze involving all packages. A full freeze will be made a few weeks before the release, the exact date of which has not yet been determined.
This is the third stage of the freeze - the first stage was passed on January 12 and led to the termination of the "transitions" (updating packages that require adjustment of dependencies for other packages, which leads to the temporary removal of packages from Testing), as well as the termination of updating the packages necessary for the build ( build-essential). The second stage began on February 12 and was associated with the termination of acceptance of new source packages and the closing of the possibility of re-enabling previously removed packages.
Debian 12 is expected to be released in summer 2023. Currently, there are 258 critical bugs blocking the release (a month ago there were 392 such bugs, two months ago - 637).
Source: opennet.ru