i use the debian package, on debian stable. they were pretty close to the mark for a while, and when became too old, we backported the newer releases and we’ll keep backporting them.
if you backport the 3.0.1 release please pull in 8bceae80bd8459f4ec5929df75d6ec0471c3d26c.
From the opensuse OBS page: Install package graphics:darktable / darktable Works fine on my Linux Mint 19.3 (based on Ubuntu 18.04) install.
This is a very important thread because I feel like there is a lot going on about features and so on, but running dt and getting updates has become adventurous since Pascal had to focus his time on more urgent matters.
The Torture Never Stops
with the arrival of dt 3 the historic PPA dried out and no real solution was available. I followed @darix advice and installed the OSB Repo, then found myself with a nightly build (I never wanted an experimental version, but hey … I wanted dt 3 in the fist place). That went well for a few months until a stupid bug showed up and on reporting this I was asked to file a bug report on GitHub.
OK, I created a GitHub account (why the fuck must I create an account just to repeat a description I have already given to someone who is involved?) explained the problem and was told that dependencies on some sql database or other in ubuntu 18.04 may cause the problem and I should upgrade sqlsomethingorother. I will never again in my life file a bug report.
Kids: I run ubuntu 18.04 - most likely one of the Top-3 distributions for dt-users. Get your act together, deal with the distros as they are. Accept that dt is used by photographers, not by hackers.
in the end it was found out that the database was NOT the problem - some hash might be wrong (I actually can’t find my contribution on GitHub anymore - the request of filing my report there didn’t come with a GitHub manual or documentation. I can log into GitHub, but my initial bug report and the communication following it is … eaten by snakes ?). Two or three days later I wanted to check if a “corrected” version of dt is available. By this time my dt builds didn’t update any more
Yesterday night - in another thread here - darix helped me to sort out this last problem. Because his directions were quite technical in the beginning, I had to ask him to guide me through step by step (I am a photographer, not a hacker). Some license or code’s validity date had expired and that had set an end to possible updates. I get it. It’s all unpaid work of people doing it for the fun and service of others. Shit happens.
Meanwhile on the “stable” branch (ubuntuusers1 PPA) things have gone south, too. Aparently the stable version comes with a flaw concerning the font size and instead of correcting this, the recommended workaround is to take a deep breath, dive into the code-mines of darktable and hack some line in a file with the fire and the sword - kill them all - set font-size to 12 manually and resurface … if you could hold breath long enough. The stable version seems as inappropriate for work as the unstable one.
This is some horribly bad user experience. I work with darktable since 2012 and either version 3 is rotten or we miss a serious PPA maintainer. Right now all serial numbers should be set back to 0.X because dt is not apt for productive work anymore
I am not blaming anyone here. You all do great work and I benefit from your skills and countless hours put into the project. If a bug in the unstable branch “bugs” me, I should use stable. Understood. But stable isn’t ready neither.
How can I help? What does it take to make darktable reliable again? Install the PPA and forget the rest until you change your PC. That’s what it was, that’s not what it is. How can it become like that again? Is there anything I can do?
By the way and for the fun of it: no, the bug hasn’t disappeared … I still can’t see edits done to images in the lighttable view. LT shows only the embedded jpg (since … end of February?), there is no more thumbnail looking like teh actual result you get when opening the photo in darkroom mode.
Are you happy building from source? I just did this (on kubuntu 18.04 which essentially is ubuntu 18.04) and there were only a couple of odd things (I had to ‘touch’ an llvm file to stop an error; I had to git init a submodule and add a bunch of dependencies marked as required for earlier versions of ubuntu - I guess because the dependencies haven’t changed since then). And I’m using the latest commit on what’s been described as a stable branch, and not what I assumed (perhaps wrongly) to be a stable tag, because the latter produced an error (I forget which - npio missing or something) at run-time. If you’re interested in building from source and run into difficulties, post them here and I’ll try and take a look. If you believe there are (new) problems not in older versions it should be straight-forward to simply go back in time and use an earlier commit.
No
That’s why
It’s not about believing (my belief is discussed Sundays at 10 in that house with the pointy roof - not here) it’s knowing/experiencing. And going back isn’t in the books, is it? There is no “unhappy? downgrade to previous version” button.
darktable is evolving fast and new features are added all the time. Maybe a part of that energy should be routed towards “ease of use and usability”
There’s no button - you’d have to type in a single command to leave the code in your working folder in the state it was at that point in time (ie before they broke some feature you want), and then build it. You seem to have taken my description of my difficulties in building the code as proof that it’s hard; in fact I built and tested 2 or 3 different versions in under 30 mins to determine which one I wanted and I’ve never built darktable before.
I was offering to help; it seems a better use of everyone’s time for non darktable devs like myself to help out with mundane build issues, and let devs like aurelien et al work their magic on the modules/pipeline and not polish the installer. I’m not sure what else to suggest; Sorry I wasn’t any help.
@beachbum maybe you’d be happier with the flatpak or snap package… The snap will update itself and the flatpak is kept up-to-date. Neither relies on your system packages.
Problems happen in all software. You can either have the new shiny or you can stay back on the old stable version and wait it out for a few minor releases.
These are my least favorite kind of posts. You’ve deligated responsibility for your tooling to someone else, written it off as technical mumbo jumbo, you won’t file another bug report, and you won’t use the (older) distro package. What are we supposed to tell you?
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I did NOT want to come over as someone who “expects” others to work for my pleasure just because I’m too dumb to do it myself. That’s also why I ended my post with the question if there is any way I can help. I’m no programmer, but maybe it’s a question of funding or renting a blade or …
I just state that - from a user point of view - my darktable experience has been a pleasure for seven years. Getting better and better. Recently this has changed dramatically.
darktable is still a very good program but it’s nowhere as easy to set-up like before. Changes have been made concerning installation and sources, I am sure there are very good technical reasons for it, but as a user these changes seem rather disadvantageous.
I hope this is easier to understand.
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@beachbum mentions “ease of use and usability” above.
I appreciate devs work on open-source s/ware for their own reasons, that is fine. I just hope someone can get satisfaction out of doing “usability" changes now and again, there must be a number of potential candidates.
I reached a dead-end with lensfun the other day. This seems like a good usability issue. With the objective of having a good-natured discussion around such things as the difference between how ordinary users (if there is such thing) see things as compared with devs, here’s how I would see lens correction working. Please forget how lensfun works for a minute or two.
So I’m working on an image and want to correct it for my wide angle lens. In the correction tool/module, I select camera and lens, and the image is adjusted, simple. This works because lens data is on my system and is up-to-date. That’s the first case.
Now suppose the data is old. When I select the camera and lens, dt goes somewhere online and sees my data is out of date. It asks should it download the latest version, I say yes, it puts it on my system, it adjusts my image, job done. There is no package I have to go and update via my distro. Correction data is independent of OS and OS flavour. There’s no “version 1” and “version 2” to consider.
If dt can’t connect to the internet, it could say it doesn’t know if my data is up to date.
Suppose there’s no correction data for my lens. Dt will tell me that.
I appreciate the exif/exiv data varies by manufacturer and is not well defined. So I say let the user specify camera and lens and if devs are sweating over how to automate this, just say No, we’re not messing with this crappy data. After all, how hard is it to specify cam and lens, assuming there are dropdown lists to help. (Though these lists would need to contain quite a lot of cams and lenses, not just the ones that have correction data)
So I think the process could be simpler and easier than at present.
RT uses .lcp files for lens correction. It seems to me this is quite open and simple. Once you’ve got hold of a file, you can make RT use it very easily.
Ok, that’s my 2p worth…!
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This is about the Linux/Unix way of doing things. In Windows (et al.) you have massive applications that do everything sort-of ok. In Linux/Unix, the principle is ‘do one thing and do it well’ (Unix philosophy - Wikipedia). Why would darktable create a new way of doing lens correction when lensfun already does all the work and darktable can just plug into it. That way darktable can concentrate on what it does best without having to constantly reinvent the wheel.
I just installed on Manjaro using the Arch distro command line posted on the dt download page and ended up with versiion 3.0. Not sure how to get 3.01, but I don’t want to build my own.
Should be available on Arch - at least it is for me. Try pacman -Syyu, which should refresh the package databases as well.
Majaro delays it’s packages by 2 weeks from Arch. So you’ll get it in a week or so.
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I use openSUSE Tumbleweed, so I install it with
sudo zypper in darktable
I just saw the word Arch and leapt in - didn’t even see the word Manjaro!
Thanks, look forward to getting it!
As a fairly regular user and being privacy conscious, I appreciate that my photo editor doesn’t connect to the internet. Especially not every single time I activate the lens correction module, which is what you seem to be suggesting.
You don’t have to do this now, lensfun-update-db does this independently of the package.
It is! It works on all the platforms.
It does more or less already, when you activate the module and there are no matches.
Reading your posts, I don’t think you full appreciate how complex it actually is. You lens just writes a number in the raw metadata. That’s it. Now exiv2/exif gets to try and figure out the make and model. Never mind when two lenses use the same number. Its a disaster from the manufacturers.
You can manually select your camera and lens in the drop down menu, can’t you?
We can redistribute LCP files, that’s why you get to fetch them on your own. In many cases, the profiles in lensfun are better than the LCP.
I’m sure LCP code would be welcome in darktable, but someone has to write that code.
I was sitting at my LUG last night and we were discussing the LUG website, and someone said “well I just want the simple stack.”
Someone else piped up quickly with, “there is no simple stack.”
And the conversation ended there.
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For me, on Linux Mint 19.3 (which is based on Ubuntu 18.04), I simply downloaded the .deb package from the OBS site for darktable. I didn’t add the repository or annything, I simply downloaded the file. Perhaps the adding of the repository is what is causing issues @beachbum?
https://software.opensuse.org/download.html?project=graphics:darktable&package=darktable
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@beachbum I think you produce much too much noise… If you want to install dt 3.0.1 via PPA on Ubuntu 18.04 there is darktable release : Panda Jim. It has been updated on March,10, only one day after the release was announced by the developers. The web site can easily be found by just typing the keywords “darktable” “ppa” “ubuntu 18.04” into your search engine.
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