No more RT nightly builds?

Hello,

For a while now (waiting for RT 5.9), I’ve been using RawTherapee nightly builds found here: https://github.com/Beep6581/RawTherapee/releases/tag/nightly

However, it appears the last build is from June 14 2021.
Have nightly builds been abandonned?

Thanks for any clarifications.

@thxbb12 there seems to be a problem on github nightly builds, pls see:

in the meantime you can get nightly builds from here:
https://keybase.pub/gaaned92/

Thanks, I didn’t see the related ticket.

The night builds from the link you provided are only for Windows.
I don’t run Windows. Any idea where I can get builds for Linux?
Thanks.

afaik there are no Linux nightly builds for RT atm. Need to compile it yourself. It’s easy.

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All right, I’ll build it from source then.

It was nice to have the nightly builds as AppImage files as it allowed more less savy people to use the latest versions of RT on Linux.

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I’ve been compiling RT from sources for about 10 years now. The statement in the Release Notes, "We update the code almost daily, " used to true and in the times when my use was daily I often recompiled every few days. The last “dev” release was apparently 27 days ago. is that a new normal?

Also, is there somewhere that progress is reported in getting support for Canon R5 EXIF metadata? I’ve seen some threads which get tangled in argumentation without any hints about when support might be forthcoming.

Thanks in advance for information on these questions.
Don

Projects have their ebbs and flows. Two of the more active developers have taken a break.

I don’t think there are specifics, unless there is already a bug filed on github, in which case you should check there. If this feature is dire for you, please consider contributing.

No, that’s not normal unfortunately. The official automated build pipe is broken and seem unmaintained.
And that information about daily updates is horribly outdated…

Adopt Exiv2 for metadata handling by Beep6581 · Pull Request #5889 · Beep6581/RawTherapee · GitHub Needs to be merged before that happens. I have tried to get it to work properly, but it is still unfinished and untested as of today.

The last update to the Dev branch was indeed 29 days ago, but that does not mean development has stopped
https://github.com/Beep6581/RawTherapee/branches

Yes, I saw those notations of updates of “active branches” but I didn’t see any explicit information about what those branches were and how those active branches relate to development and the eventual release of a new development branch. I still don’t quite understand. As I said, I’ve been doing very frequent dev branch compiles for many years. I have done that because of personal interest and to be able to report any issues I find to developers.

I simply didn’t want to miss something if something was available for avid users to use and test. Thanks again for your limited answer. It’s great to know that development is ongoing. It’s unfortunate that we can’t have additional insight into the slower pace of releases of dev versions and what it means. However, I also understand that you may also be in the dark about that.

Thank you for what you were able to report.

Don

Like you, I am just a passionate user and not a developer. I really don’t know why development has slowed down, but I hope that the devs are doing well and it’s not something wrong. I understand that it is all volunteer work and I appreciate everything they do.

There’s no straightforward way to attach a description to a branch. The best way to see what will be going into the dev branch is to look at the pull requests. Not all branches have pull requests though.

The lack of updates to the dev branch are mainly due to two things. One, as mentioned already, is the slowdown of development activity. The other reason is that we are (or at least I am) waiting for the 5.9 release to happen. I have two feature pull requests open which I don’t want to merge into dev because I don’t want to introduce last minute bugs. The Exiv2 metadata branch is also waiting for similar reasons.

Now, back to the topic of this thread. I’ve been working on building AppImages directly in GitHub. It is not meant to be a replacement for the broken nightly builds, but rather a backup. The builds will be available here https://github.com/Beep6581/RawTherapee/actions/workflows/appimage.yml. Click on a build and you should see the Appimage under the artifacts. This has not been tested thoroughly, so it may not work for everyone.

Two years ago, the core development team basically consisted of 3 or 4 people with long-term involvement in the project. Nearly all of them needed to shift their attention to their private life - although not everyone communicated this clearly. So, unfortunately, this has left the project hanging in limbo.
I still visit Pixls on a daily basis, and I consider myself the de facto maintainer of the project (even though not with all rights and privileges), so in that sense, ‘official’ support is still available. Then again, there are plenty of people who can provide excellent answers to RT related questions.

This is certainly true. The underlying issue is that the person with intimate knowledge of the release process is not available. And nobody else knows (or dares?) to make a release on their own.

My 2¢ (take it for what it’s worth) is that the current dev version, 5.8-3049, is more than worthy of the moniker 5.9 Beta and should be released as such.

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Oh I totally agree. However, there’s the issue of packaging stuff so that it properly works and can be installed on the different OSes we support. The tech savvy people already know how to run RT, but a release should also work for the broad audience.

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Until now, was the process of packaging RT for the various platforms (Linux, Windows, OSX), somewhat automated or was it done manually?
If it was done manually, who was doing it and is it documented somewhere?
Thanks.

@Lawrence37 wrote: “I have two feature pull requests open which I don’t want to merge into dev because I don’t want to introduce last minute bugs. The Exiv2 metadata branch is also waiting for similar reasons.

Pardon my ignorance (density?) but that means proper CR3 metadata support will be in 5.9.x, not initially 5.9, correct?

Thanks.

This is correct, as far as I am concerned.

Honestly, I don’t know. There is this: How to release RawTherapee - RawPedia but it seems a bit barebones.

We should work to democratize that knowledge once the people in the know return :slight_smile:

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Thanks, but the link on RawPedia you mention is about releasing the source code.

We need people who could:

  1. Prepare the source code tarball as mentioned in the RawPedia link above.
  2. Compile the Linux version and create an AppImage for the Linux platform.
  3. Compile the Windows version and package it in an installable version for the Windows platform (I don’t run Windows so I don’t even know if the version available on the official website contains an installer).
  4. Compile the OSX version and package it as a .dmg package.

I could do 1) and 2) if needed.

Also, the content on the official website will have to be updated with the new release announcement (and explanation of the new features) and updated links to the new files above.

Do any of of you have access to the official website?

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