darktable and backwards compatibility when modules are updated

Software darktable
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I’ve got a question coming from the Simplify Tone Equalizer thread. This question was somewhat OT, so I’m creating a separate thread.

What’s the official darktable take on this? Will updates to darktable ever break old edits? Coming from Lightroom there is a versioning system for such changes to LR. It just got updated to “Process Version 4” to take the new masking options into account. It’s still backwards compatible though and switching to an older version will give you the “older toolset”. I know the filmic rgb module has the “color science version” under options. Is that how it will be handled for every module in dt?

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Updates to darktable modules are designed to preserve old edits, though this cannot always be entirely guaranteed (due to the extent to which we can test all of the variations). I suspect that the comment from the other thread was referring to the fact that, at the time, the Pull Request was still a work in progress. By the time it was merged it will have been updated to handle old edits. Each module has its own internal version number allowing this sort of thing to be managed at a module level.

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