Konserve Interview - App of the Month
You can also check out the overview of Konserve.
Konserve: Interview with Florian Simnacher
When did you begin to work on Konserve? What can you tell us about the history of that project?
I started to develop Konserve in March 2002. At this time I passed all my exams in university. I was about to prepare for a practical training in Greece.
So I had two free months which I devoted completely to the development of Konserve. After that the architecture of Konserve was ready. Since that time there were basically added new features and little improvements.
Who else should be mentioned when we're talking about Konserve?
The most important contribution came from Michael Bieligk, a professional graphic designer. He designed all graphics and the website. Konserve wouldn't look that good without his help.
Kjell Morgenstern and Janne Laehteermaeki contributed important patches for Konserve.
And at least there are a lot of people who sent in useful feedback, bug reports and ideas. All of them would deserve it to be mentioned. But the list would be too long.
Which are your plans for the future of Konserve? May the users look forward to any new features?
A short-term objective is to make it stable enough to move it from kdenonbeta into one of the stable KDE packages and to publish it. I'm pretty confident of that goal because the number of bug reports is decreasing and the number of feature requests goes up.
The next feature will be the creation of incremental backups. As far as I know incremental backups are not supported in the compression and archiving classes of the KDE libraries. Because of that I'm experimenting with rsync as a backend for Konserve.
Furthermore you should be able to define a pattern for file names to be able to exclude those files from the backup.
In which other open source projects are you involved as well?
All my free time I spend with programming I spend on Konserve.
What do you think about "open source" and what's your motivation to publish your programs at no charge?
I wrote Konserve because I needed it. I wanted to make backups from my important files. And I didn't want to struggle with scripts and cron jobs.
Konserve was published because I thought it'd be useful for others as well. I never thought about selling Konserve. To develop software and to sell software are two different things and I'm definitely better in the first one.
There came so many ideas and code as feedback after the publishing of Konserve. That's worth the costs of publishing Konserve in the internet.
Did you ever had the chance to meet other KDE developers in real life?
In 2001 I saw some main developers on the LinuxTag in Frankfurt. But I didn't had the chance to speak with them personally.
Do you have the possibility and the time to work for KDE at your job?
No. But I'd like to. So I would be possible to react much faster to the suggestions of Konserve users. And features could be implemented much faster than it's possible in my limited free time.
Do you speak for the propagation of Linux/KDE and if so how?
Whenever I speak with others about computers I try to point out the advantages of Linux and KDE. I willingly help if someone has a technical question. But I don't try to convince someone who's happy with other software.
Do you have any favorite tools in KDE (apart from Konserve)?
The program I could turn down at least of all is KMail. It has all the features I'd like and the last crash is so long ago that I can't remember it.
Most of the time I use XEmacs to program. But since KDevelop 3.0 is published I'm getting into the development environment. The debugger frontend is what I like most.
How does the hard- and software look like you're working with?
I use a laptop with a 1 GHz processor and 256 MB RAM. I always try to use a current KDE CVS version.
How does Florian Simnacher spend his free time when he's not programming for the KDE project?
I love to hear classical and I also play it on the double bass, best in an orchestra. Apart from that I like reading. Of course computer related literature but novels as well. Particularly from German authors of the 20th century.
You can also check out the overview of Konserve.
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