Updates to the trixie freeze policy

[Sebastian Ramacher]

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: 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 at their maintainers' discretion and are
expected to benefit the development of the installer.

Milestone 2 (Milestone 1 + 2 months): 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
Sebastian for the release team

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