The initial freeze phase for Debian GNU/Linux 12 Bookworm has been announced by the Debian release team. They stopped accepting requests for transitions on January 12 and are now trying to finish the ones that are already underway. The second (soft freeze) and third (hard freeze) milestones are planned for February and March.

bits from the release team: bookworm freeze started

=== bookworm Transition and Toolchain freeze ===

We're pleased to announce that the freeze for Debian 12 'bookworm' 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 part of the toolchain to stop uploading those packages [1] without prior approval from us. 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:
* 2023-02-12 - Milestone 2 - Soft Freeze
no new packages, delayed migration
* 2023-03-12 - 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 ===

The current list of Release Critical bugs for bookworm [3] is progressively looking better. Thanks to everybody who is helping out. That said, we're not there yet, ideally the number of RC bugs goes down to zero. And autoremoval has done it's job, there's a large set of packages that are currently *not* in bookworm, so this is your last chance to bring them back.

Don't forget to organize your bug squashing parties:
https://wiki.debian.org/BSP/ There's one planned in Switzerland later this month.

=== release notes ===

We like to draw your attention to the release notes. We have hardly received any proposals (or even ideas), don't forget to file things worth mentioning against the release-notes pseudo package in the bts or prepare your MR on salsa [4]. The release notes editors will be helping you to shape the text, so don't be shy and submit those rough ideas already.

=== testing upgrades ===

If you are in the position to already upgrade some hosts from bullseye to bookworm, we like to hear from you if you run into issues. If you don't know which package is to blame, please don't be shy and report it against the upgrade-reports pseudo package and people following that package will try and help find the right package (help wanted for the triaging).

=== 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/testing/essential-and-build-essential.txt
[2] https://release.debian.org/testing/freeze_policy.html
[3] https://udd.debian.org/dev/bugs.cgi
[4] https://salsa.debian.org/ddp-team/release-notes/