Somehow getting this from a Debian stable version to begin with doesn't make much sense to me. If I were using software where bugs could lead to death, I would hope I'd track any bugfix releases myself and retrieve them directly from the vendor as soon as they came out.<p>I mean, it still makes sense to give it a freeze exception so they don't ship a seriously buggy version with a stable release, but I would <i>also</i> hope that no doctor is relying exclusively on whatever version happens to come with a particular Debian stable release, without checking on the status of that version.
If it isn't obvious (it wasn't, for me), "RC" in this context means Release-Critical.<p>Here (<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/" rel="nofollow">http://bugs.debian.org/release-critical/</a>) is a handy graph showing Debian's trends for the number of open RC bugs.
From a process perspective I'm not sure what the benefits of conservative processes are if they result in shipping an effectively unusable or dangerous product, nor indeed the point of a definition of "release critical" if releases happen anyway (with in excess of 1000 "release critical" issues).<p>My background is very much in commercial software rather that FOSS. Could someone explain why Debian ships something as niche as this with it in the first place? Isn't that the equivalent of Windows shipping with, say, Sage Accounting in just in case someone wants to use that?