Testing Darktable - You're not a dev, but you can help !

Software darktable
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That’s a topic we’ve discussed with @dterrahe. Currently the Darktable code is being adjusted massively to refactor code. The ultimate goal is to ease the future migration to Gtk4.

Fact this is touching many parts in the UI, and we don’t have automatic testing of the UI.

This message is to ask for help. If you are using daily master build of Darktable please watch for any UI inconsistencies. The UI should not have changed, so if you see a missing/misplaced/buggy widget please report.

Thanks in advance !

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How about inconsistencies in language? I have just made a GOM (grumpy old man) response to @kofa on that AgX thread.

Is the upgrade to GTK4 the right time to make textual information follow a standard style, and is there a style guide to follow, or should one be adopted?

Code is something I can’t help with, but I am quite happy to “English” textual information. If nothing else, this should aid machine translation to other languages.

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The style and language inconsistencies should be discussed separately of the testing work asked here. Here we are only talking about Gtk widgets visible/actionable on the UI.

Again, most people don’t know what is correct or not in some context on the UI (e.g. should a widget be visible here or not in this case?). So what was asked here is to watch for recent changes in the UI. As I said there should be NO changes due to the refactoring of Gtk code.

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there is https://open.qa/, which is used by (open)suse (obviously) but also Fedora and maybe other distros and project to test their products.

It is based on screenshots, so big UI changes require redoing them all.

But I can say that openQA is one of the corner pieces of making our rolling release distro so stable for daily use.

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Thanks @darix, something to keep in mind. I suppose we need a champion to step in and drive this project.

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Indeed. This sounds like something that could be set up by someone who knows openqa and also happens to be a darktable user but who doesn’t need to know anything about darktable internals.

It would be inefficient to expect one of the (very few) dt core developers to also learn openqa and spent a lot of time on it, that will be taken away from their dt development time.

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I maintain a Fedora copr build branch of darktable, update multiple times a week and until now, I did not see any UI glitch.
For me, it looks like the changes are doing great.

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I think the only user-interface fault I have noticed in recent times is shift-click not working as described (and wanted by me!).

i posted about it here. Am plucking up courage to report it as an issue. That doubtless sounds silly, but first-time is a bit daunting!

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I noticed that the lower toolbar in the darkroom was completely missing in the latest nignightky builds (5.3+450) but it already occurred with prior versions. Maybe this fault is on my side, but just wanted to see if anybody could reproduce. Linux Mint 21.3 I am speaking of the toolbar where you can apply presets, highlight clipped colors, switch on HQ Processing etc.

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Probably an issue on your side. Have you tried <ctrl>+<shift>+B ?

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Wasn’t a problem for me on Mint 21, and is fine now on Mint 22.2. I don’t use the filmstrip, but it is available. The central white ^ is easy to miss, but it cycles through the possibilities, as would the mentioned keystroke.

I checked in both windowed and full-screen.

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so, testing latest master here. A few things for which I don’t know if it a bug or feature.

When I open an image do color calibration on a small part of the whole, crop it, and then go to color calibration, the selection might not be on the image anymore. Logical, but may be confusing

Another thing: I tried to upload images from my camera, 2210 selected from a mounted z6iii, but no upload. (the upload bar flashes, no further output. Not sure if it is ‘master’, since it uses the same db as 5.2.1

DT 5.2.1. worked flawlesly and showed a log of the upload

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Why would this be either a bug or a feature? If you pick a patch in color calibration, you basically tell the module “this bit should be a neutral gray”. The module sets the illuminant accordingly. You then cropping out the area with the selected patch is irrelevant, the measurement is done and is still valid.

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Strange as the import module has not changed since 5.2.1. No idea at the moment.

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So migration to gtk4 will actually happen eventually?

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Either the migration to Gtk4 is done or the project will be dead in some years.

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I agree.
Although I think Gtk3 will be alive for some time. And in theory there might be other ways to solve some problems with Wayland etc.

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I don’t see the relation between Gtk and Wayland. Thoses are orthogonal issues.

Fact is that if today Darktable was still using Gtk2 it will be a dead project. And, as I said, this will happen in some years if the migration to Gtk4 is not done. In other word we cannot stay with Gtk3.

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Has the option to migrate to a different UI toolkit been considered as well?

My question is just an engineering curiosity, I don’t have an opinion and I am very ignorant on this topic.

I am just wondering what gtk brings to the table that other toolkits don’t, and whether the changes between v3 and v4 are deep enough to make considering alternatives even possible (i.e., the effort required would be similar).

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