KPilot - Interview with Adriaan de Groot
You should also read the overview of KPilot.
Klaus Stärk interviews KPilot author Adriaan de Groot.
Please introduce yourself, what's your role in the KDE project?
I'm Adriaan de Groot, longtime PIM person; I do some bugfixing on KPilot — is that my role? I do lots of other stuff as well, like watching over portability (both FreeBSD and Solaris)1, general bugfixing (I never use software I'm not prepared to bugfix), doing some Quality Team stuff like managing Junior Jobs and trying to help people start KDE development. You might want to take a look at Tink's interviews with me for a little background.
1 Footnote: thanks to the quality of the KDE and Qt frameworks, very little KDE code is really unportable — or you have to be in the realm of system administration tools, and even there plugins and sufficient #ifdeffing can help. As a result, the KDE desktop is remarkably consistent across Linux, the BSDs, and Solaris. That means, in turn, that as a desktop user there is no practical difference amongst the OSsen since your user experience is homogenous anyway.
When did you start working on KPilot?
Waaay back in 1998, I'd just got my first Palm V, ran KPilot, thought it could use a little polish, sent a patch to Dan Pilone (the author), got it accepted and kinda went on from there. In retrospect, it was an excellent Junior Job situation — a small improvement in an application, well-mentored by the author, leading to someone's continued involvement in KDE.
3. KDE 3.3 was just released a few weeks ago. Rumours are that the KDE Quality Teams helped to improve KPilot. Is this true? And how was this done?
Yes, the KDE Quality Team helped out in several ways: one was that Carlos Woelz put in many hours updating the documentation, making sure the screenshots were OK, describing new features. He also went through and checked all the WhatsThis? messages and added them where they were missing. This gives KPilot pretty much 100% WhatsThis coverage, which is pretty unique. We also discussed some usability and layout issues, which led to some redesigned menus and popups... and then there were new icons and the KPilot splash screen contest, both of which freshened the look (the old splash screen had been there since 1998; the new one is much better matched with the rest of the PIM suite). So the Quality Teams put in a lot of effort to improve the application, and I really appreciated their input and dedication.
KPilot is part of the KDE PIM family. Can you show us what the advantages of being part of the PIM family are for KPilot?
One disadvantage is that it takes longer to get bugfixes out to people — and occasionally there's really nasty ones that affect particular handhelds that I don't have. In those cases, being part of the PIM family is a bit of a chore and I do separate releases as tarballs fairly regularly.
But that's just one disadvantage, and the advantages are numerous: Allan, Cornelius, Daniel, Ingo, Matt, Reinhold, Till, just to name a few of them. It really is a bit of a far-flung family and there is lots of communication between the PIM folks, we work on features together, try to nurture new talents. Also the other PIM guys put out a lot of really nice code that I can make use of.
And what are the common goals for the future of the PIM family?
Your personal information will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. I hate to say stuff about the PIM family as a whole without first having talked to the guys about it. Back in Osnabrück we had a pretty clear set of plans for KDE 3.3, some of which were actually realised, but right now, um .. let's say I would like PIM to become a cohesive set of applications that interoperate in that special KDE way to manage all of the day-to-day information flow that people today expect — tracking conversations across multiple media (email, IM), coordinating multiple information streams into a coherent view of projects, stuff like that. And at the same time, it will still be a collection of applications useful in their own right for a particular purpose, like, say, sending mail. KPilot fits into these goals by integrating (one kind of) handhelds into the PIM circle, making information flow seamlessly from the PIM applications on your desktop into the applications on your handheld1 2.
1 Footnote: well, it should. In practice, this is pretty darn hard to do because of limitations on both sides (KMail still makes it hard for me to get individual messages from it, so I can't sync mail), and I don't have nearly enough time to track all of the changes and features and niftiness in PIM applications and libraires.
2 Footnote: KitchenSync is supposed to do the same thing, with an API that is general enough to encompass more than just one type of handheld device. I'm waiting for it to settle down to see if KPilot code can be reused there for Palm support.
What do you think of the current state of groupware features on the KDE desktop?
blushes I don't actually use any of the groupware features like Kolab or eGroupware or Groupwaise; nor do I use Kontact. I am happy about the integration between the applications, it behaves in a natural fashion, as far as I'm concerned.
KPilot was published under the GPL. What do you think about Open Source? Have you ever thought about distributing your software commercially?
I didn't really choose the GPL for KPilot — Dan did, before me. I've introduced some LGPL stuff into it to make it possible for 3rd party plugins to be produced with closed source. Not that that has happened, but it's possible. I've heard Stallman speak, think he's right about some things, but certainly not all (emacs? ugh. I'm half vi, half kate, and really feel that a KDE developer should eat his or her own dog food and use kate or kdevelop, and send patches too). I don't believe half of the stuff that the /. crowd claims for open source — for me, it's fun to do, spurs social contacts, and after a while yields nice useful software.
I've never considered releasing my software commercially — too much hassle, too many responsibilities.
How much time do you spend on KPilot?
Varies wildly. Past couple of evenings from 10pm til 2am, the weeks before then nothing more than answering mail about it. It's a bit about being in the groove, and there's lots of other things I need to, have to, do as well.
And what do you do when you're not hacking?
Raising a family. Writing a thesis. Moving house (that's kept us busy for almost two months now).
Favourite junk food?
Tortilla chips, plain.
Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds?
Richard, since I've actually seen him and have been able to form an opinion (approx. 50% positive). Linus is just a grey blob — and don't forget I don't use Linux1.
1 Footnote: well, I just installed SuSE 9.1 on a crashbox to see how KPilot behaves there because I got a patch from someone inside SuSE, and I needed a system with a screwed up default config timezone-wise anyway.
Emacs or vi?
vi — but, like I already said, it should be kate.
Your favourite UNIX/Linux distribution?
FreeBSD 5-CURRENT.
GPG public key?
FEA2 A3FE is for personal stuff, B571 535C is for KPilot-specific things (what I sign the tarballs with).
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