Some days ago the news was released by the Debian developers, who have already fixed a plan to freeze Debian 12 "Bookworm" release package base, a version that if all goes as agreed by the development team, Debian 12 is expected to be released in mid-2023.
With this, it is planned that for the month of January 2023, the first freezing stage will begin from the package database, within which the execution of "transitions" (update packages that require dependency tuning for other packages, leading to temporary removal of packages from Testing) will be started stopped, as well as it will stop updating the packages needed for the build (build-essential).
After that, for February 12, 2023 is contemplated which will take place the first phase of freezing, which is the «Soft» of the package base, during which the acceptance of new source packages will be stopped and the possibility of re-enabling previously removed packages will be closed.
On March 12, 2023, the second phase of freezing will be applied, which is the "Hard" before the release, during which the process of transferring key packages and packages without autopkgtests from unstable to tested will be completely stopped and the intensive testing and troubleshooting stage will begin by blocking the release.
It is mentioned that the "Hard" freezing step is introduced for the first time and is considered a necessary intermediate step before a full freeze covering all packages, and that as of yet the full freeze time has yet to be determined with certainty. precision.
It is also worth mentioning that speaking about Debian, the news was also released that the team responsible for managing the accounts in the Debian project has cut Norbert Preining's status for inappropriate behavior on Debian's private closed mailing list (details of the conflict have yet to be revealed).
In reply Norbert made the decision to withdraw from Debian development and move into the Arch Linux community. Norbert has been involved in Debian development since 2005 and has maintained around 150 packages, mostly related to KDE and LaTeX.
Apparently, the reason for the restriction of rights was a conflict with Martina Ferrari, who maintains 37 packages, including the net-tools package and Prometheus monitoring system components.
“The teams and colleagues I have actively worked with, in particular the TeX team and the Qt/KDE team, have been excellent and welcoming, and I will miss working with them,” he said.
"Unfortunately, only the 'political' side of Debian is creating such a toxic atmosphere."
Norberto's form of communication, which was not contained in expressions, was perceived by Martina as sexist and in violation of the community's code of conduct. Perhaps the decision was also influenced by past disagreements with Lars Wirzenius, one of the early maintainers of Debian GNU/Linux, related to Norbert's disagreement with the policy of imposing political correctness and criticism of Sarah Sharp's actions.
Norbert believes that the environment in the project has become toxic, and the actions against him have become a reaction to expressing his opinion and calling things by their proper name, not following the general line of political correctness.
“Wish we could be more helpful for your inquiry. If any situation changes regarding the need for a statement or other general publicity needs, I will be sure to contact you."
Norbert also drew attention to the double standards in the community: on the one hand, they accuse him of intimidating other project participants and, on the other hand, they unleash a persecution against him, taking advantage of a privileged position in the management teams and not observing the own norms of the community.
Finally if you are interested in knowing a little more about it, you can check the details in the following link.
This is for the Testing branch?
Well, nothing new, as always debian freezes in January and the new version comes out between July and August approximately every two years.
It seems that you have discovered the wheel or something.
We'll see :
Positive points :
1) It is planned that for the month of January 2023 the first stage of freezing of the package database will begin, within which the execution of "transitions" (update packages that require adjustment of dependencies for other packages, leading to temporary deletion of packages from Testing) stopped, as well as updating packages needed for assembly (build-essential) will be stopped.
Which is necessary since today many things that the user wants to compile manually end up installing too many things manually because the " Build-essential " meta-package does not include it.
2) On March 12, 2023, the second freeze phase will be applied, which is the "Hard" before release, during which the process of transferring key packages and packages without autopkgtests from unstable to tested will be completely stopped and will begin the intensive testing and troubleshooting stage by blocking the launch.
It is also necessary. By combining those 2 points, I hope they take advantage of and fix the common dependencies of 32-bit and 64-bit files, and also the paths where they are installed and if they start using their specific paths according to their architecture.
Bad points :
1) "Unfortunately, only the 'political' side of Debian is creating such a toxic atmosphere." The truth is that politics and/or religion is something that should not be brought into software development issues that has nothing to do with those issues directly. Any being who can use at least 5% of their reasoning knows that it is very easy for these issues to lead to tense conflicts due to nonsense or due to differences in idioologies, that the latter in itself is not a bad thing, it just causes a very wide diversification even when it is unnecessary.
2) "Norbert's disagreement with the policy of enforcing political correctness and criticism of Sarah Sharp's actions."
: Wanting to impose something will never be well received
3) «Norbert believes that the environment in the project has become toxic, and the actions against him have become a reaction to expressing his opinion and calling things by their proper name, not following the general line of correctness politics." Forcing the imposition of the current Progressive agenda is a terrible idea in any field.
Basically this is more of an abandonment of keeping technical things working, and instead looking to fix and fix them as soon as possible. They focused more on politicizing and focusing on things that in the long run would end up affecting the end user, but more to Debian itself than for these things, it may experience a massive migration of users like SuSE Professional 10 at the time, which at same many migrated to Ubuntu 4.10.
Since a historical moment while SuSE Professional 10 gave us one of the worst distros, Ubuntu emerged as an easier to use alternative than Debian, which ended up with the vast majority of users who came from SuSE, and others curious from other distros.