Vieter #

Important
Because this project is still in heavy development, this documentation tries to follow the development branch & not the latest release. This means that the documentation might not be relevant anymore for the latest release.

Overview #

Vieter consists of two main parts, namely an implementation of an Arch repository server & a scheduling system to periodically build Pacman packages & publish them to a repository.

Note
While I mention Vieter being an “Arch” repository server, it works with any distribution that uses Pacman as the package manager. I do recommend using a base docker image for your distribution if you wish to use the build system as well.

Why? #

Vieter is my personal solution to a problem I’ve been facing for months: extremely long AUR package build times. I run EndeavourOS on both my laptops, one of which being a rather old MacBook Air. I really like being a beta-tester for projects & run development builds for multiple packages (nheko, newsflash…). Because of this, I have to regularly re-build these packages in order to stay up to date with development. However, these builds can take a really long time on the old MacBook. This project is a solution to that problem: instead of building the packages locally, I can build them automatically in the cloud & just download them whenever I update my system! Thanks to this solution, I’m able to shave 10-15 minutes off my update times, just from not having to compile everything every time there’s an update.

Besides this, it’s also just really useful to have a repository server that you control & can upload your own packages to. For example, I package my st terminal using a CI pipeline & upload it to my repository!

Why V? #

I had been interested in learning V for a couple of months ever since I stumbled upon it by accident. It looked like a promising language & turned out to be very fun to use! It’s fast & easy to learn, & it’s a nice contrast with my usual Rust-based projects, which tend to get quite complex.

I recommend checking out their homepage!

What’s with the name? #

Before deciding to write this project in V, I wrote a prototype in Python, called Pieter. The name Pieter came from Pieter Post, the Dutch name for Postname Pat. The idea was that the server “delivered packages”, & a good friend of mine suggested the name. When I decided to switch over to Vieter, I changed the P (for Python) to a V, it seemed fitting.