Dear toolchain, debian-installer, and image maintainers,

We, as the release team, are aware that we are late with the announcement of the freeze timeline for
trixie. After some internal discussions on how we want to handle the freeze for trixie based on the
lessons learnt from the bookworm release, we like to get your feedback on our changes listed below
before we announce the freeze schedule.

During the bookworm release we made the following observations:
  motivation and engagement of maintainers drop as the freeze becomes longer
  the work on d-i and images takes time and requires a non-moving set of packages to work on

To reduce the time that maintainers of packages not contained in the build essential / toolchain set
or packages that are somewhat relevant for d-i are affected by the freeze, we hope to keep their
engagement up by delaying the transition and soft freeze, but freezing relevant packages instead. We
would like to get input from debian-boot to define the relevant criteria so that the freeze is
useful for them. We would start with the following set

  packages producing udebs
  packages involved in a minimal debootstrap

In the following discussion we will simply call them "udeb producing packages" but better wording is
more then welcome.

We thus propose the following timeline:

Milestone 1 (potentially January 2025): Toolchain and d-i freeze

As in bookworm, we start with the freeze of toolchain with the goal to stabilize build essential
packages and compilers and interpreters of major ecosystems (Python, Ruby, Rust, Golang, Haskell,
Vala, LLVM). The list of packages that is involved can be found at [1].

In trixie we will also freeze all packages that produce udebs with the intent to stabilize the
relevant packages for debian-installer and debian-boot. Changes to these packages need to be
coordinated with the respective teams. Effectively, this means that any change to a package
producing udebs will require an unblock request with an explicit ACK from d-i to migrate and we also
won't be doing any transitions of udeb producing packages.

udeb producing packages maintained by debian-boot and debian-cd are exempt from these rules to
facilitate their work. Updates to these packages should be prepared ot their maintainers' discretion
and are expected to benefit the development of the installer.

Milestone 2 (Milestone 1 + 2 month): Transition freeze

At this point we stop starting transitions.

Milestone 3 (Milestone 2 + 1 month): Soft freeze

As with bookworm, with the soft freeze only small and targeted fixed are appropriate. Also, packages
not in testing are blocked from migration to testing.

Milestone 4 (Milestone 3 + 1 month): Hard freeze

Key packages and packages without autopkgtest will be treated as in the full freeze and require
manual review by the release team.

Milestone 5 (Milestone 4 + ? months): Full freeze

This is the last phase of the release where all packages require manual review by the release team.
Updates that are allowed to migrate to testing are reduced to: targeted RC bug fixes, targeted bug
fixes for important bugs if done via unstable, translation and documentation updates if done via
unstable, updates of packages relevant for the release process.


We are happy to receive your feedback - especially on the change regarding d-i. The proposed text
for the freeze policy can be found in the following merge request on salsa:

https://salsa.debian.org/release-team/release.debian.org/-/merge_requests/27

Best
X for the release team

[1] https://release.debian.org/testing/essential-and-build-essential.txt (FIXME) which we intend to
extend with all llvm-toolchain versions that are planned to be included in the trixie release.