I’m fine with “5.5.0.” I know this is the master branch of stable release “5.4.0.” And, accepting a tiny risk (only ever seen one problem) it’s what I use, so that I goodies like AgX sooner.
“git123” I’ve assumed, is like a sub version of 5.5.0, and the thing that increments regularly,
“.d271a49a-1+13609.1” No idea. Not sure that I even need to know. But somehow I’d like to know!
And it might help me when and if I do face a problem, and that one problem I mentioned is current
The version number is built by tools/get_git_version_string.sh. It uses the git describe command with a couple of flags.
The command finds the most recent tag that is reachable from a commit. If the tag points to the commit, then only the tag is shown. Otherwise, it suffixes the tag name with the number of additional commits on top of the tagged object and the abbreviated object name of the most recent commit.
For me, git describes (run on a PR branch) prints: release-5.5.0-318-gf09e19613d
it’s based on the release-5.5.0 tag
has 318 additional commits
the last commit has the hash (ID) f09e19613d.
The last part can be confirmed with:
$ git rev-parse HEAD
f09e19613d4fec51f19ba3aea217c7255800213b
$ git log
commit f09e19613d4fec51f19ba3aea217c7255800213b (HEAD -> agx-warning-reset)
Author: Mario Zimmermann <mail@zisoft.de>
Date: Sat Feb 14 11:08:27 2026 +0100
reset agx warning signs
If you also see -dirty, it means your code has local modifications.
As long as no database related stuff or changes of existing modules are merged it‘s quite safe to use the development builds.
If you have used changed modules, then all touched edits using them won’t be usable in general in older release builds.
So don’t use it for important edits if you aren’t aware of the changes …
Just to add one additional detail, you can view the commit (d271a49a) and the previous ones (the commit log) by opening: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/commits/d271a49a/. Use that to figure out whether a fix you’re interested in is part of the version you’re running, or to get a rough estimate of how old the build is. (Though commits are made before they are accepted into the codebase, so the commit dates are a lower bound, not the final truth.)
I update from the Open-Suse Build service binaries, I do not build my own dt. So the local git commands are not going to be useful for me. But I’m bookmarking this thread with my dt-reference bookmarks, so I can read again in the future.
Somehow I’d managed to avoid finding the github darktable commits page up to now. Bookmarked that too, of course: very useful.