Debian developers reported about achieving the first stage of freezing Debian 12 ” BookWorm “, which involves the cessation of” Transitions “(updating packages, requiring adjustment of dependencies in other packages, which leads to temporary removal of packages from Testing), as well as the termination of the packages update necessary for assembly (build-essential ).
on February 12, 2023, a transition to a soft freezing of the package base is planned, in which the reception of new starting packages will be stopped and the possibility of re -turning on previously remote packages is closed.
on March 12, 2023, a rigid freezing is scheduled 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 correcting the blocking release of problems will begin. The stage of rigid frost is introduced for the first time and is considered as the necessary intermediate stage before a complete frost, covering all packages. The full frost time has not yet been defined.
Currently there are 637 critical errors that block the release (at the time of freezing in Debian 11 such errors were 472, 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.