start of vieter-0.3.0

content/posts/vieter-0.3.0/index.md

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+---
+title: "Announcing Vieter 0.3.0"
+date: 2022-06-03
+draft: true
+---
+
+When this post is live, Vieter 0.3.0 will have been released! This release
+really does come with a lot of new features, including more reliable builds and
+a new cron implementation!
+
+## What is Vieter?
+
+Vieter consists of two independents parts, namely an implementation of an Arch
+(Pacman) repository, & a build system to populate said repository. The goal is
+to remove the need for an AUR helper & move all builds to a remote server. Not
+only does this greatly reduce update times on lower-end systems, it also
+prevents AUR packages from being built multiple times on different systems.
+
+While I specifically mention Arch & the AUR, Vieter is compatible with any
+Pacman-based distro & can build PKGBUILDs provided from any Git source.
+
+## What's changed?
+
+### New cron daemon
+
+Perhaps the most important feature in this release is the implementation of a
+cron daemon. While 0.2.0 still relied on crond to periodically start builds,
+0.3.0 can schedule builds completely independently.
+
+The daemon understands a subset of the cron expression syntax. The build
+schedule can be either configured globally or on a per-repo basis. This allows
+the user to fine-tune certain packages, e.g. if they want them to be updated
+more regularly than all the rest.
+
+### More robust builds
+
+Often, a build would fail with exit code 8. This error indicates that makepkg
+wasn't able to install all dependencies, caused by the builder image not being
+up to date enough. Due to this, each build now runs `pacman -Syu` before running the actual build.
+
+Another useful additions to builds is that packages from the target repository are now