app of the month akregator interview


Stanislav Karchebny

What was your first contact with KDE?

Stanislav Karchebny: If I recall correctly it was the end of summer 2003, and my first contribution was to <a href="http://www.konversation.org/">Konversation</a> project.

Is this your first project or have you worked on projects for KDE before?

Stanislav Karchebny: Before aKregator I worked on Konversation and <a href="http://amarok.kde.org/">amaroK</a>, also I imported KBrain to KDE CVS, taking maintainership from its original author. Not much has happened to KBrain since then, but its now going to become integral part of a much larger project. I also helped Martin Traverse with his <a href="http://klapjack.sourceforge.net/">KLapJack</a> LiveJournal client, I'm still using my modified version locally, but it has never been released.

akregator is a new project. Was it your idea and why akregator?

Stanislav Karchebny: aKregator was born out of need for good RSS reader for KDE. There were none at the moment, so I looked at other software like straw and abilon, found them unacceptable quality and started my own. Thanks to Frerich Raabe, I used his excellent librss for start, so I didn't have to invent the wheel again. And it seems like aKregator quickly became not only my favourite, its robust, quick, handy tool, just the way I like (though, there are still rough edges, but we're working on it!)

You are the founder of akregator. Is it a fulltime job or can you still work on other things?

Stanislav Karchebny: I started the project, and in the beginning gave most of my time to it, now there are several excellent developers, who continue to support what I started, so I can spend time on more interesting things. aKregator works for me, but they strive to make it even better. Thank you guys, you do a great job!

How did you choose the name of akregator, aren't you afraid that we have too many K's?

Stanislav Karchebny: The K was kinda required back in days =) I tried several names (the original source was named KRssReader), but finally settled with 'Aggregator'. Double g sounded way too gnomeish, so i replaced it with obligatory K. I have received a lot of hate mails about its name since then, but its still akregator and I hope will remain so. On the other hand, if I chose the name now it would probably be Puppy of something else not computer related at all.

Why did you pick KDE as a development platform and did you consider any programming languages other than C++?

Stanislav Karchebny: KDE is very well integrated. This is the environment I feel most comfortable with. All blah-blah-blah aside, I feel that KDE is a synergy - as a whole its much much more than sum of its parts. As information architect and World Wide Integration believer I can only be glad this system is so well balanced.
Besides C++ my all time favourite is Ruby, and probably Ruby version of aKregator would be faster to develop, but I wanted the application to be as widespread as KDE itself is, so C++ was the only choice. Given the flexibility of this language and quality of KDE libs, I never regretted the decision.

akregator can be used with Kontact and Konqueror. Was this easy to integrate? How did you find working with the other developers?

Stanislav Karchebny: KDE has very strong and friendly community, so working with other people is a breeze. You only have to know what you are doing and why. And how that affects other people. Integration is pretty easy, however there's a lack of documentation, so often you have to experiment a lot while peeking bits here and there in others' sources and asking Kontact and Konqueror maintainers how to achieve the result. Hopefully there soon will be more advanced docs on KParts (hey, we all already know how to load that damned part, show me l33t stuff!), Kontact plugins and Konqy integration.

akregator uses librss, what have been the issues with integrating this into KDE and has anyone considered making it a freedesktop project so other programmes can use the same RSS library?

Stanislav Karchebny: Well, the librss we are using is no longer librss, though credit to Frerich still due. There is work in progress on converting librss to libakregator, which will handle most of the existing RSS and Atom formats as well as non-XML ones, and other applications like KNewsTicker will be able to take advantage of this library, so there will be common backend, with common configuration and much less maintenance burden.

There are a number of people who work on akregator. Do you know them only thought the internet and how do you attract new developers?

Stanislav Karchebny: Unfortunately I missed aKademy this year, so I know them only over the net but I hope to see my fellow aKregator developers next year. We talk over Skype with them however, this is really fun. And new developers are attracted just by virtues of the project. George Staikos for example seems to be using aKregator now, given the pace he fixes bugs for it =) We recently received an inquiry from Nir Dremer, who just wanted to help. I hope we can already say hello to him as our new helper. You are welcome to join, too!

The multitude of RSS readers becoming similar to the number of Free Software IRC programmes, how does akregator compare to the competition (thunderbird, blam, straw, liferea, Konqueror's own RSS sidebar plugin and also planet)

Stanislav Karchebny: Even OSNews considered aKregator a worthwile piece of code, so I think its just excellent.

KDE is used on different distributions, which do you use?

Stanislav Karchebny: I'm using Gentoo. I run latest KDE CVS HEAD, built using excellent Michael Pyne's <a href="http://grammarian.homelinux.net/kdecvs-build/">kdecvs-build</a> script.

Akregator is Free Software. Do you like the "GNU-system" or are you just as happy working on proprietry software?

Stanislav Karchebny: Yes, I like free-as-in-speech software. I like free-as-in-beer software too, but if people want to make money out of it, they are free-as-in-speech to do so.

Which person is more important to you: Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds?

Stanislav Karchebny: Linus. I don't use emacs =)

What other interesting things should a we know about "the man behind akregator"?

Stanislav Karchebny: hmm what do you mean? I'm married, I have a daughter (1 yr. 8 mo.), I'm working for Skype Technologies, I'm creating a collaboration environment, which will also utilise KDE (remember me talking about KBrain above?), I like good company and KDE is probably the best company I can ever have.

akregator currently does not work with the feed from planet.gnome.org, is this deliberate? :)

Stanislav Karchebny: Yes, this is part of our "Blog for PlanetKDE you bastards" initiative :) Seriously, I just checked, RSS 2.0 feed works fine.