Anonymous
2) After a period of time in Sid, if lots of errors, the package gets rebuilt with fixes many times until it’s moderately solid, after which it passes that level of stability, it gets “promoted” to Testing.
3) At that point, it does “live” in testing for a considerably longer period of time. Nevertheless, IF (that’s if and only if) the individual package or package group meets the same standard as a release grade verification, that package or set of packages can, and often IS, promoted to Stable, which in this context is Trixie.
Yes, uploads to go sid, and most packages go from sid to testing in 5 days if no blockers. Testing is released as stable every couple years. Packages do NOT go from testing to stable. They can be removed from testing (and still be in sid) when bugs are found, etc. When preparing for a new release, testing is frozen and no new versions of stuff from sid, only fixes and removals until release.
The only way new versions of packages come to debian stable is via stable-backports or stable-security. Security allows very few exceptions to the no new version policy; firefox-esr and chromium are the main ones. stable-backports is not enabled by default, but it contains things that have been backported from testing to stable. That’s the only normal way for new versions of to enter stable, for example yt-dlp needs constant updates so the stable version can’t be used for too long with youtube, so debian users often enable stable-backports just for that.
I’m talking pure debian of course. Antix has its own repos and update stuff debian stable doesn’t.