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content/posts/vieter-0.3.0/index.md

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+---
+title: "Announcing Vieter 0.3.0"
+date: 2022-06-13
+---
+
+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!
+
+This release ended up taking me over two months, but I'm quite proud of it :)
+It not only adds a lot of useful features, but also paves the way for a lot
+more cool features down the road!
+
+## 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.
+
+The repository can also be used independently, providing a convenient server
+for publishing Arch packages from CI builds for example.
+
+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.
+
+Builds can now also use dependencies that are part of the target repository.
+This allows building packages with AUR dependencies, as long as all
+dependencies are also being built for said repository.
+
+### Build logs
+
+The main server now stores the logs of each build, including the exit code.
+This makes it a lot easier to debug why builds fail.
+
+### Improved documentation
+
+The [Vieter documentation](https://rustybever.be/docs/vieter/) has had a pretty
+major re-write to get it up to date with this new release. Now there's also
+[HTTP API docs](https://rustybever.be/docs/vieter/api/#introduction) & [man
+pages](https://rustybever.be/man/vieter/vieter.1.html).
+
+## Interested?
+
+If you're interested in Vieter, considering joining
+[#vieter:rustybever.be](https://matrix.to/#/#vieter:rustybever.be) on Matrix!
+The source code can be found on my personal
+[Gitea](https://git.rustybever.be/vieter/vieter).