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Ubuntu makes a release every six months, and supports those releases for 18 months with daily secu- rity fixes and patches to critical bugs.
As Ubuntu prepares for release, we “freeze” a snapshot of Debian’s development archive (“sid”). We start from “sid” in order to give ourselves the freedom to make our own decisions with regard to release management, independent of Debian’s release-in-preparation. This is necessary because our release criteria are very different from Debian’s.
As a simple example, a package might be excluded from Debian “testing” due to a build failure on any of the 11 architectures supported by Debian “sarge”, but it is still suitable for Ubuntu if it builds and works on only three of them. A package will also be prevented from entering Debian “testing” if it has release-critical bugs according to Debian criteria, but a bug which is release-critical for Debian may not be as important for Ubuntu.
As a community, we choose places to diverge from Debian in ways that minimize the difference between Debian and Ubuntu. For example, we usually choose to update to the very latest version of Gnome rather than the older version in Debian, and we might do the same for key other pieces of infrastructure such as X or GCC. Those decisions are listed as Feature Goals for that release, and we work as a community to make sure that they are in place before the release happens.
1.2.1.3. Development community