Canonical made a change to Ubuntu LTS interim releases ( for example, 20.04.1, 20.04.2, 20.04.3, etc.), aimed at improving the quality of releases at the expense of meeting exact deadlines. If earlier interim releases were formed in strict accordance with the planned plan, now the priority will be given to the quality and completeness of testing of all fixes. The changes were adopted taking into account the experience of several past incidents, as a result of which, due to the addition of a fix at the last moment and lack of time for checking, regressive changes or incomplete fixes of the problem surfaced in the release.
Starting with the Ubuntu 20.04.3 August Update, any bug fixes that are classified as release blocking made within a week prior to the scheduled release will shift the build time of the release, which will allow you not to push the fix in a hurry, rather than rush to test and check everything … In other words, if a bug is found in builds that have release candidate status, the release will now be delayed until all checks for the fix are complete. For early detection of release blocking problems, it was also decided to increase the freeze time for daily builds from a week to two weeks before the release, i.e. there will be an additional week before the first release candidate is published to test the frozen daily build.
Optional announced to freeze the Ubuntu 21.04 package database from introducing new ones features (Feature Freeze) and a shift in emphasis on the finalization of already integrated innovations, identification and elimination of errors. Ubuntu 21.04 is scheduled to release on April 22.