Future of Modules developed by AP in DT???

I saw a post asking for help regarding Rdarktable and the above question came to my mind.

Where is this message? Reference please.

Modules can possibly be merged if not incompatible but there is no guarantee. A fork is most of the time a fail attempt because it needs lot of resources. Anyway, darktable is well and alive with a strong community of developers and users.

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Darktable is more than a single developer. But, I do appreciate the work AP has put in over the years and hope that he may one day return to the development of the main DT version. But that is up to him.

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No question about that, AP has moved dt in a new and modern way to process images. He has done an incredible work for sure.

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This link

@Rajkhand : But this link is speaking about d&s module already integrated since long time in darktable and for sure this module will stay in darktable as we never ever remove a module.

The OP had issues with RDarktable D&S module. I’m not sure what that has to do with he modules on darktable (not R). If you have an issue with darktable (any module), start an Issue in darktable GitHub and I’m sure someone will try to understand and resolve the issue.

To add to it (and absolutely not to say one is better than the other!! I’m not into that):

@flannelhead for example is also involved in the development of filmic, and still very active in the main DT space (And still thinking of ideas where to go to next with filmic, I believe :wink: ).

I’ve had bugs in things like color-calibration auto-detect modes, which were fixed by DT community members.

And - at least as I see it - R&Darktable at the moment has no features that main Darktable does not have, main Darktable has (major) new stuff that is not in R&Darktable.

R&Darktable doesn’t seem to have work done to it (on github at least) since august, and those changes were cleanup changes and ripping stuff out changes.

So… I don’t know if the people still around DT know the insides of AP modules as good as AP. But they do know them. And there are developments. So those modules will not be deprecated or left out to die anything soon.

I used r&Darktable when it was new, and it had some tweaks that i liked to defaults … But i quickly went back to DT the moment huge developments arrived in DT that were too awesome to leave behind.

I love AP for what he has done , and i can handle his language and ego so to say. But i have the feeling that DT has received a place where he is quite happy with it, so it gets less time from him.

Maybe if he comes up with another awesome idea and new module , AND doesn’t want to help DT integrate it, there are still people around that could port his new features to DT.

What I’m trying to say is that i don’t suspect problems with the AP code currently in DT being unsupported. And i don’t see issues in both projects existing side by side . And changes from one can be cherry picked in the other.
Time will well the truth , but at the moment in use DT is functionally not behind r&Darktable , but not the other way around. So DT is the one to be for new stuff. At the moment at least.

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@Pascal_Obry The question I raised looking at that link was not for a particular module but the general development, bug fixes, improvements in those modules. I have also noticed that he is not actively involved in the development so the the question just came.

Yes that was his decision. He’s also said that from a development module point of view that darktable is feature complete. I wouldn’t expect a whole lot of changes. When there are changed, they can be pulled or ported, as they already have.

Well, he wanted to gift us with color EQ, but unfortunately it did not land: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/pull/12082

The Color EQ could maybe be revived and integrated as I see @flannelhead did quite a lot of comments/fixes.

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I think I tried to compile flannelhead’s version once but got crashes, so it may need to be updated. If there is an intend to integrate it, I’d be happy to look at the gui part, particularly what needs to be done to create actions that loupedeck etc knobs can be assigned to.

AFAIK the guided filter was the thing that was proving most troublesome and AP is still working on it. I think he closed the PR to avoid too much discussion/argument while dev was in progress. When it’s ready, I’m sure it’ll be pushed. If it’s only pushed to R&Dt there’s nothing to stop it being ported to darktable as well.

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