kdesvn Interview - App of the Month
Description, Author Interview.
Mark Volkert interviews Rajko Albrecht about kdesvn.
Rajko Albrecht
I'm 36 year old software developer living in Cologne, Germany. I started kdesvn with taking the base first subversion-c++ wrapper from RapidSVN and tried to give it a nicer frontend.
Who else should be credited for kdesvn? What was their job within the project?In the past Michael Biebl had made some fixes, Andreas Richter from the QSvn project transformed the svnqt-wrapper so it builds with Qt 4. And don't forget the guys from RapidSVN - without their c++ wrapper for Subversion kdesvn wouldn't be in the stage that it is.
Was kdesvn your first project, or did you start KDE work with something else? Are you working on other projects?I have the project kmysqladmin for KDE, but due lack of time it has no priority this moment (and there is no such need for it). Other leisure projects I have use the Linux/Qtopia based handhelds.
What was the reason to start the project?I'd just looking for a subversion client for Linux but all I found wasn't what I wanted, installable or complete. Second it was a good reason to learn a lot about Subversion itself and about newer KDE programming.
In which language is kdesvn written and how have you developed it?Kdesvn is pure C++, the buildsystem is generated with KDevelop, the UI is build with Qt designer, icons with Inkscape - nothing special :)
kdesvn is new, but really stable. What can we expect for the future? Or is kdesvn complete?Kdesvn is far away from being complete. In the future I plan to build some wizards, for example for restoring deleted items, creating tags/branches, eg., all stuff, that Subversion newbies may need help to get right. The Konqueror integration needs to get better.
I had thoughts about integrating an admin area in it, but I'm not sure if it would make sense to put it into a client.
Politicians, economists and software developers are heatedly discussing the subject of software patents in Europe. What is your point of view here? How would you personally be affected by software patents?Software patents? Horrible. Not sure currently how I would be affected because I'm not interested in wasting my rare time to check if a stupid company somewhere on the world has a patent of a red marked button or something similar trivial. In my opinion software is something like photography: ideas are in 95% percent always the same. But the photo itself is the special. Eg., I try to protect my photos. But I would never piss someone having the same idea making their own photos. So when a company thinks it must protect their software - fine, then close the source. But ideas are free. And software patents are patents of ideas.
This year's KDE summit will take place in Glasgow, Scotland. Will you attend the meeting?No. No time and no money.
And have you had any chances to meet some fellow KDE developers in real life?No.
Why do you help KDE?I use it. And I like most of the development interfaces of KDE.
Which UNIX/Linux distribution do you use for your work and why?Since years I've used RedHat/Fedora Core. Why.... Not sure how to say: RedHat was one of the first (the first?) using a good package system, it was quite stable and well supported, looks more like a monolithic system without running into troubles when I decide to do things beside the official maintenance tools. The conception of other pure community distributions often looks a little bit confusing to me and I have to spend a lot more time on maintencance.
Let us know a bit more about you. Do you have family? Pets? How much time do you spend working on KDE?I have a daughter, no pets. Time programming depends, but mostly not more than 30 hours per month.
Is programming for KDE your most important hobby?Not really. I like my camera much more ;)
Description, Author Interview.
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