The Debian Developers informed that the first stage of freezing the Debian 11 package base has been reached ” Bullseye “, which implies the termination of” transitions “(updating packages that requires correcting dependencies for other packages, which leads to the temporary removal of packages from Testing), as well as the termination of updating packages required for building (build-essential).
On February 12, 2021, a soft freeze of the package base will take place, at which the reception of new original packages will be stopped and the ability to re-enable previously removed packages will be closed. On March 12, 2021, a hard freeze will be applied before the release, in 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 issues blocking the release will begin. The hard-freeze stage is introduced for the first time and is seen as a necessary intermediate stage before the full freeze, covering all packages.
There are currently there are 472 critical release blocking bugs (at the time of freezing in Debian 10 there were about 577 such bugs , Debian 9 – 275, Debian 8 – 350, Debian 7 – 650). Debian 11 is expected to be released in mid 2021.
Optional announces about changes related to hardware architecture support. Debian 11 will support amd64, arm64, armel, armhf, i386, mips64el, mipsel, ppc64el and s390x architectures, i.e. unlike Debian 10, support for the mips architecture has been dropped. Debian 11 may be the last release to support 32-bit x86 (i386) architecture – no final decision has been made, but developers are encouraged to consider dropping support for i386 starting with Debian 12.