| Dear toolchain, debian-installer, and image maintainers,
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| We, as the release team, are aware that we are late with the announcement of the freeze timeline for
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| trixie. After some internal discussions on how we want to handle the freeze for trixie based on the
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| lessons learnt from the bookworm release, we like to get your feedback on our changes listed below
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| before we announce the freeze schedule.
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| During the bookworm release we made the following observations:
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| motivation and engagement of maintainers drop as the freeze becomes longer
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| the work on d-i and images takes time and requires a non-moving set of packages to work on
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| To reduce the time that maintainers of packages not contained in the build essential / toolchain set
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| or packages that are somewhat relevant for d-i are affected by the freeze, we hope to keep their
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| engagement up by delaying the transition and soft freeze, but freezing relevant packages instead. We
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| would like to get input from debian-boot to define the relevant criteria so that the freeze is
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| useful for them. We would start with the following set
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| packages producing udebs
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| packages involved in a minimal debootstrap
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| In the following discussion we will simply call them "udeb producing packages" but better wording is
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| more then welcome.
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| We thus propose the following timeline:
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| Milestone 1 (potentially January 2025): Toolchain and d-i freeze
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| As in bookworm, we start with the freeze of toolchain with the goal to stabilize build essential
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| packages and compilers and interpreters of major ecosystems (Python, Ruby, Rust, Golang, Haskell,
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| Vala, LLVM). The list of packages that is involved can be found at [1].
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| In trixie we will also freeze all packages that produce udebs with the intent to stabilize the
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| relevant packages for debian-installer and debian-boot. Changes to these packages need to be
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| coordinated with the respective teams. Effectively, this means that any change to a package
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| producing udebs will require an unblock request with an explicit ACK from d-i to migrate and we also
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| won't be doing any transitions of udeb producing packages.
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| udeb producing packages maintained by debian-boot and debian-cd are exempt from these rules to
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| facilitate their work. Updates to these packages should be prepared ot their maintainers' discretion
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| and are expected to benefit the development of the installer.
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| Milestone 2 (Milestone 1 + 2 month): Transition freeze
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| At this point we stop starting transitions.
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| Milestone 3 (Milestone 2 + 1 month): Soft freeze
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| As with bookworm, with the soft freeze only small and targeted fixed are appropriate. Also, packages
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| not in testing are blocked from migration to testing.
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| Milestone 4 (Milestone 3 + 1 month): Hard freeze
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| Key packages and packages without autopkgtest will be treated as in the full freeze and require
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| manual review by the release team.
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| Milestone 5 (Milestone 4 + ? months): Full freeze
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| This is the last phase of the release where all packages require manual review by the release team.
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| Updates that are allowed to migrate to testing are reduced to: targeted RC bug fixes, targeted bug
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| fixes for important bugs if done via unstable, translation and documentation updates if done via
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| unstable, updates of packages relevant for the release process.
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| We are happy to receive your feedback - especially on the change regarding d-i. The proposed text
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| for the freeze policy can be found in the following merge request on salsa:
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| https://salsa.debian.org/release-team/release.debian.org/-/merge_requests/27
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| Best
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| X for the release team
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| [1] https://release.debian.org/testing/essential-and-build-essential.txt (FIXME) which we intend to
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| extend with all llvm-toolchain versions that are planned to be included in the trixie release.
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