Debian development is a cycle guided by the metronome of the daily archive update (aka "dinstall") run and mirror sync. Each day developers upload new packages and wait for the metronome to tick, the mirrors to update, the users to test out the changes and report back with new bugs. This effectively limits us to one test cycle per day.

Generally reducing the period of a test cycle will speed up software development, which has the potential to let us do more between releases, or speed up the Debian release cycle.

So why not update the archive and the mirrors hourly? Or to start off with, twice a day? It's hard to accurately predict all the effects this would have though we might get some indications from Ubuntu, which already does this.

Update: As of December 2008, dinstall runs four times a day.

Pros:

Cons:

Notes:

This proposal is also discussed on debian-devel@lists.debian.org. See http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/01/msg00141.html for that discussion

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