Announcing Funtoo "Harvester"!

[drobbins]

Hi all --

I'm happy to announce our most recent new technology, called "Harvester"! You  can learn more at https://www.funtoo.org/Funtoo:Harvester (including FAQ and Developer FAQ) with a summary below:

The harvester project is focused on providing a meta-repo that can be used for active development by Funtoo Linux contributors. This allows evaluation of experimental and potentially disruptive changes in a completely separate tree without impacting regular Funtoo Linux installs.

The Harvester Concept

Harvester exists as a branch of kit-fixups, which is listed at the top of this page. harvester.funtoo.org uses it to generate a full meta-repo, containing experimental changes. These changes are made available via git from harvester.funtoo.org directly, and can be consumed via ego sync.

Harvester Benefits

With harvester, we aim to:

Make community testing easier

By providing a system that can be used to do full community-based integration testing without having to locally generate your own meta-repo.

Accelerate development

By providing a 'judgement-free' space to evaluate aggressive and potentially breaking changes, and to learn how these changes impact Funtoo, for better or worse, without causing problems on live systems.

Make things more fun

We all have limited time. Sometimes we make a 'best effort' to test our PR, but it still breaks something. This is definitely "not fun" for the contributor, for Funtoo staff, or for users. We want to avoid these situations, and avoid having to frantically rush to clean up breakages that impact users, or get upset at people for braking the tree. Harvester allows us as a community to roll out mature, tested changes to users. This keeps Funtoo development "fun" and a positive experience for all! We don't want the 'stressful way' of dealing with problems to be our default way. It should only be the rare exception. Our process should produce successful results rather than demand individual perfection. Harvester supports a process that keeps things "fun" by reducing the risk and thus stress related to changes to Funtoo.