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Hi all,

=== bullseye Transition and (build-)essential freeze ===

We're pleased to announce that the freeze for Debian 11 'bullseye' has
begun. On January 12th we stopped accepting transition requests and we
are working to complete the transitions in progress. We ask the
maintainers of packages that are (transitively) part of
(build-)essential to stop uploading those packages [1]. We remind
everybody to stop uploading large or disruptive changes to unstable,
from here on experimental is the place to do that.

Further details of the freeze are available in the freeze policy [2].
The freeze contains 3 more milestones:
* 2021-02-12 - Milestone 2 - Soft Freeze
no new packages, delayed migration
* 2021-03-12 - Milestone 3 - Hard Freeze - key packages and packages
without autopkgtests need a manual unblock for migration
* TBA - Milestone 4 - Full Freeze
all packages need a manual unblock for migration

=== RC bugs ===

We are missing the Bug Squashing parties. We have the impression that in
the current list of Release Critical bugs for bullseye [3] there are
quite a few bugs that are relatively easy to fix by NMU and we normally
don't see them this late in the cycle. Please everybody, we know the
times are different, but with your help, we can keep this freeze short.

=== bullseye architectures ===

We have decided that the architectures that will be part of the bullseye release are: amd64, arm64, armel, armhf, i386, mips64el, mipsel, ppc64el
and s390x (i.e. the same we had for buster minus mips).

There are some issues with a couple of the architectures, the number of
porters being the main one. However, we realized that the call for
porters was late and makes more sense at the start of the release cycle, instead of near the end. We intend to do the bookworm call soon after we release bullseye and architectures with too few porters will be dropped
early (after sufficient warnings).

One of the architectures at stake is i386, which we stopped waiving.
We're interested in the discussion about i386 support in Debian that
was going on recently and that will probably continue in one form or
another. If the outcome requires changes to how we build some ports, the
start of the bookworm release cycle is a good moment to try to get those
in place.

We're also interested in the proposal [4] to make it less troublesome
for architectures to move between Release Architecture and Debian Ports,
albeit we see that this mainly doesn't depend on us.

=== your packages ===

Please take this opportunity to check packages are in their final shape
and stay vigilant for release-critical bugs.

On behalf of the Release Team,
Paul

[1]
https://release.debian.org/bullseye/essential-and-build-essential.txt
[2] https://release.debian.org/buster/freeze_policy.html
[3] https://udd.debian.org/dev/bugs.cgi
[4] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2020/11/msg00381.html


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