Hello,
Is there any rough estimate as to when RT 5.9 will be released?
Also, is there a list of new features that will be included in the new release?
Thanks a lot.
I don’t know… SOON™?
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I’m looking forward to a 5.9 release as well. I currently have to build the source and edit camconst.json to get the Panasonic S5 to work.
You can look at the open and closed sections of the milestone tracker for an idea of what the changes are. Eventually, an ‘estimated’ release date will be posted there as well.
Our release model is a bit wonky at the moment, but as @afre mentions, the nightly builds are usually stable enough and are the current way to go.
I am confident that the development version can faithfully reproduce edits from previous versions, but can I be confident that v5.9 will be able to faithfully reproduce edits from the development version. That is, will a development version pp3 file give the same final result in v5.9 as it did in the development version?
Thanks everyone for your answers.
bobm is raising a very good point.
I’m also hesitant to use the nightly builds because I don’t want to lose or have corrupted pp3 files.
Thanks.
As far as I know, the only way an RT release won’t faithfully reproduce any previous dev version edit is if you were using a new feature which has had a big update previous to the release version, or if there has been any bug fix that modifies the behavior of any classic tool. Neither of them should be a problem for you, as it means RT should work better than in the dev version.
And about corrupted pp3 files, that won’t likely happen just because there has been a new release.
Think about the dev versions (called «commits») as new releases from a rolling release application. At some point in time one specific commit gets «frozen», some bugs are fixed (no new features added), and a release version is published. So there’s very little difference from that last commit and the released version. A.K.A.: you will mostly be running a dev version with a flag calling it «release version».
On my machine I can even open an image developed with the last dev commit, and as far as I haven’t used any new tool not present in v.5.8, or some tool heavily modified since v.5.8, everything is fine. And I’m talking about a previous version opening an image edited with the latest commit…
As others have already said, just check it!
OK, thanks for the clarification of RT development and version release scheme.
I’ll check out the nightly builds with confidence now 
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I recall there being on post where @heckflosse opened an ancient sidecar in dev and it looked just fine.
Like @XavAL correctly says: effectively, we’re doing a rolling release with every nightly build. There are no (?) instances where a nightly build introduces a backwards incompatibility with a previous full release, but there is no strict guarantee that a nightly build is backwards compatible with other nightly builds. We do try to avoid problems though, but there have been a few cases where changes to the code were unmade or remade to work differently with respect to a previous build. Any serious photography work could suddenly have looked different because of that. So always tread with care - we do the same.
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On that note, it is always possible to have two installations in the ready. dev for exploration and fixes and 5.8 for otherwise. I don’t remember if you can use another naming convention for your *.pp3 so that the two RTs don’t override one another…
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I had to uninstall 5.8 in order to run the dev build by HIRAM (I’m on Mac) because of the .cli clash.
But I can still run the nightly build in Linux/Parallels because it’s in a separate virtual system.
Perhaps the same will work on PC.
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