Debian developers have announced that Debian 13 has entered the stage of hard freezing before its release. This means that the transfer of key packages and Autopkgtes from Unstable to Testable has been halted, and intense testing and bug-fixing activities are underway. The hard freeze is a crucial step before the complete freeze, which will occur a few weeks prior to the scheduled release in the summer. Currently, there are 244 critical bugs blocking the release, a decrease from the 258 bugs encountered during the transition to Debian 12.
This marks the third stage of freezing for Debian 13. The first stage, which started on March 15, resulted in the suspension of Transitions and updates to essential packages like Build-essential. The second stage, which began on April 15, saw a stop to accepting new source packages and re-inclusion of previously removed packages.
In addition, the release team has announced the suspension of official Debian 13 releases for the MIPS64el platform. However, they have decided to include the RISC-V 64 platform as one of the officially supported platforms for Debian 13.