configuring wihtout kde4 or gnome ?

I'm sorry to say there is none of both. BIT was developed as a pure GUI tool. I recently added a commandline restore option which will be released with the next version. A documentation for the config-file is also on the wishlist but nothing done yet.

'remove_old_snapshots' controls the max age of snapshots to keep:
'enable' allowed values: 'true|false'
'unit' allowed values: '20|40|80' ==> handlers for Days|Month|Years
'value' allowed values: numeric ==> n units (default 10 years)

Regards,
Germar

Thanks for the prompt reply, even if it was the answer I was hoping not to see :-)

Oh, I forgot to mention that once there was a command line interface (https://code.launchpad.net/~ryan-c-ahearn/backintime/command_line_interface) but it was never merged into main dev trunk and is quite outdated by now (I think it's not even 1.0). I've no idea why this wasn't integrated as this was long before I joined the BIT-Team.

Thanks for that info.

Do you have any opinion on the level of effort required to either
(1) port the kde4 interface to kde3, or
(2) create a DE-neutral GUI?

Thanks.

(1) sorry, I don't know what exactly had changed from kde3 to kde4. So I can't tell how much effort that would be.
(2) what do you mean with DE-neutral GUI? For GUI programs you'll have to use a framework. The two most common frameworks are GTK+ and Qt.
Backintime-gnome is based on GTK+2.0 and backintime-kde4 is based on Qt4. So as long as your shell has bindings for one of these frameworks Backintime should run just fine.

Yesterday I started to write a manpage for the config-file. So maybe in a couple days I can provide that for you.

I just uploaded the manpage to dev trunk. Until a new version is released you can download the manpage from
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~bit-team/backintime/trunk/view/head:/common/man/C/backintime-config.1
and use 'man backintime-config.1' to read it.

sorry, has to be 'man ./backintime-config.1'

To answer "what do you mean with DE-neutral GUI? For GUI programs you'll have to use a framework. The two most common frameworks are GTK+ and Qt."
First, at the risk of being pedantic, I'll point out that you don't *need* to use a framework for a GUI, you could write it in raw Xlib calls. (And no, I wouldn't suggest anyone ever do that.)

But... the problem is not that the GUIs are written in Qt or GTK+. The problem (at least for the Qt GUI) is that it is (apparently) tied to kde4. When I tried to install the program, configure checked for kdeinit4, which I don't have, and when it didn't find kdeinit4, it bailed out. And yet, I do have Qt 4.8.2 on my system. So evidently the GUI is not just using Qt, it appears to insist on having kde4.

And I have gtk, gtk2 and gtk3 installed on my system, but the configure script again gets into a deep blue funk since I don't have gnome-session.

Now, maybe I can do an end-run around these checks and install working GUIs; I hope I can. And, if I can, then maybe all that is needed is a different check to see if appropriate libraries are available.

...<hack>...<hack>...<hack>...

Looking a bit more, I see that 1.0.24 (without the kde or gnome GUI installed) won't work on Slackware 14.0 since 1.0.24 wants keyring.py, and that is neither part of slackware nor included in the backintime-1.0.24.tar.gz
I downloaded. (Anyone care to comment on whether this is a Slackware bug or a backintime bug? I am leaning toward a backintime issue since the only "keyring.py" on my Ubuntu 13.04 system is in /usr/share/doc/...)

To deal with my lack of keyring, it seems if I don't run the kde4/configure and just handraulically copy Makefile.template to Makefile, and then comment out two instances of

        if self.config.get_keyring_backend() == 'kde':
            keyring.set_keyring(keyring.backend.KDEKWallet())
        else:
            keyring.set_keyring(keyring.backend.GnomeKeyring())

as well as

    import keyring

in password.py, all seems to be good with running backintime --backup-job. (And, in fact, 1.0.24 won't even give me the '-h' help without these edits.)

Sadly, after all that, trying to run the "kde" GUI rewards me with

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./app.py", line 42, in <module>
    from PyQt4.QtGui import *
RuntimeError: the sip module implements API v7.0 to v7.1 but the PyQt4.QtGui module requires API v8.1

Finally, thanks very much for the man page, it should prove extremely helpful.

Good point on the Xlib calls. But thats no fun ;)

Ja, you're right. Beside PyQt4 it uses PyKDE4, too. I missed that last time, sorry. I can't tell why this is used as I wasn't involved in writing this (just joined BIT-Team half a year ago).

keyring is part of python-keyring (http://home.python-keyring.org/ which seams to be down atm). On Debian based systems there is a python-keyring package. On Arch it is called python2-keyring. But I don't know where to find this in Slackware, sorry. If there is no Slackware package, you should ask on Slackwares bugtracker for this. It's not (directly) Backintime related.

Hi,
we are currently working on a new major release which will come with only one GUI depending only on Qt4 (I ported KDE4 GUI to pure Qt4). It's not done yet but it already run well. So if you like to test you'll find it in https://code.launchpad.net/~bit-team/backintime/Qt4

Regards,
Germar

Germar,

thanks a lot for the info. I'm a bit swamped for the next 10 days, but I'll get a look at it after that and get back to you.

Cheers.

Germar,

that was a lot more than 10 days, but I finally got a chance to look at it. Everything is great with the code I got from that link, thanks very very much for taking out the KDE-specific dependencies.

I owe you a beer (or similar).