This issue is to document something I think we need to solve an issue of a lack of "room" to test new changes in Funtoo without creating a crisis/break situation in the tree. Some people want next-release to be used for testing bleeding-edge things but this is frankly not a real solution for this even though it is more aggressively updated.

Here's why next-release doesn't work for testing. Using it for testing will just cause next-release to become more unstable and doesn't address the lack of work by the community on proper integration and testing. Bleeding-edge users will just ignore a stable release and then we have two releases, one for people who want bleeding edge and some breakage, and one that is mostly ignored. The "unbreaking" of the tree will still be the burden of BDFL and senior staff engineers. This isn't what we want in Funtoo. It doesn't scale and sucks for everyone by catering to those who don't perform testing of their work.

The goal for harvester is to be a fully forked Funtoo, which will build all releases of Funtoo. It will consist of a fully forked "harvester" repo based on kit-fixups and have a completely distinct set of kits and meta-repo hosted on funtoo infrastructure. The tree will be regenerated automatically and logs exposed to developers. Users will be able to use harvester releases via ego sync. There will also be harvester builds done automatically via metro, with build logs shared via HTTP.

The harvester will work by auto-forking a new YYYY-DD branch on the 1st of every month, based on the master branch of kit-fixups, and this branch will be used for tree regeneration for the entire month, plus any additional commits to this branch by developers. Thus, harvester will auto-resync with official Funtoo every month. This will provide a month window to test more complex changes in a "real" distro – covering all aspects of testing, including tree regeneration, building stages, and actual use and updates on end-user systems.

Once tested, these changes don't have an automatic path to inclusion in official Funtoo. A PR still needs to be opened once there are sufficient confidence that the changes are mature enough to appear in the official distro.

My thoughts are to host the harvester repo on github, and have much more relaxed PR submission rules, and host the harvester meta-repo and kits on a funtoo git server.