@jonathanBieler / @Andy_Astbury1
Direct links to development installer/appimage:
Link to site providing the above direct links:
The first 2, Linux and Windows, are generic names linked to the latest development version, so those are always up-to-date. The 2 macOS links are to a specific developer versions (3065 in this case). I’m not at all familiar with macOS, so I do not know why there’s one for 10 and one for 11…
Maybe bookmark this post so it is easy to find later on…
As one of the remaining developers, I think I have something to say about this too 
Sorry for the long post in advance…
About the overdue release and current state of affairs: it is a difficult matter, but imho it’s all about (lack of) transparent communication and having single points of failure.
The following is in a similar vein as @floessie’s earlier comment.
Beep6581/Morgan showed he was a dedicated and active developer/maintainer up to the release of 5.8 in February 2020. Regardless of the reason (not COVID), his contributions became significantly lower shortly after that. At some point it became apparent that it was mostly talk and no action. Team members were not given a reason for the sudden change in activity. Neither was there any form of knowledge transfer to ensure the continuity of the project. I fail to understand why he didn’t, I certainly don’t like that he didn’t, because it effectively put the project in its current limbo state.
Other members of the team simply have no experience with certain tasks, for example preparing a release (I still don’t know exactly what it means that the default translation file needs to be ‘revised’). And unfortunately, I still don’t have enough time to invest to figure things out (e.g. I have no clue how package distribution works for Linux), and I am simply afraid of botching things up. So, we’re stuck here until somebody with enough knowledge, skill and time saves us. 
A few specific comments:
To my understanding, the development team of RT has never been really big anyway. 4 or 5 people at most. We did lose some very active developers three-four years ago, but the team has also seen new people contributing code (@rom9, @Lawrence37, @Pandagrapher for example).
What I will say about this, is that I think it is difficult to get familiar with the code, making it quite a challenge to start contributing quickly. There is a lot of… let’s call it “unpleasant” code and dated coding practices. The only way to improve this, is by a lot of refactoring, which is not most people’s favorite job.
I have heard you say this before, but do you have an idea where the idea comes from that common users need to understand GitHub? Sure, we track our issues there and it does save me a lot of time if somebody submits their issues there directly, but I am equally happy to copy reports over from here if that’s more convenient for them. I mean, this is our official support forum after all…
And if it’s about downloading nightly builds, I would say this page is now pretty clear Release Automated Builds · Beep6581/RawTherapee · GitHub Perhaps I would even go so far to argue that anyone who cannot figure out which file they need, shouldn’t be wanting to play with a nightly build anyway…
Really? I didn’t know… who are you talking about?
Until recently it was more difficult, but now it’s not hard at all:
Or just link the RawPedia article directly of course 
I see the merit of direct links and at the moment this would even be feasible, because the naming scheme of the nightly builds has changed. They are generic names without a date or build number or anything. But there are downsides to that and we may change it again at some point. However, if we do, we would need to manually update the links in the forum thread every day. That’s just extremely impractical…
Yup. I admit, I haven’t contributed that much, partly because for the most part, RT does meet my needs as-is. But I do have some stuff on my list of things that I really feel should be tweaked and I do plan on revisiting them. I know when I made some scrolling fixes, I promised to do a more thorough dig-in/cleanup “soon” - well that was something like three years ago. In my case, COVID has, in general, led to me being pretty demotivated in all things photography. One of the big things I’ve always used my camera for is live music events, and that kinda died or was very toned down for a while. That reminds me, I still need to take a tungsten ColorChecker shot so that a DCP profile can be generated for the A7M4. I have literally procrastinated for two months on that one…
For me, while I never directly was impacted by COVID (I have some evidence that makes me think I had an asymptomatic exposure pre-vaccination, and a possible breakthrough around New Years, but nothing severe), seeing society’s reaction to it in my country has led to a great loss of faith in humanity and I’ve been really demotivated the past year. Hopefully as things calm down again I’ll have more motivation in the future to resume contribution. I suspect that for others, even if COVID was never a primary reason, it was probably a contributing factor in some way. (In the case of Mr. Hardwood, I would expect that COVID’s supply chain impacts would be problematic for a house remodel, despite the May 2020 claim that COVID was not a factor, that was nearly two years ago…). On top of all that, some staffing changes at work led to me picking up a lot of slack for people that NOPEd out last fall, and it’s finally starting to calm down again. In theory… We’re now cancelling a bunch of staffing reqs because we can’t produce enough product to keep up with demand thanks to supply chain problems. The COVID gift keeps on giving, even indirectly!
I also suspect that while COVID may not be a primary factor for many of the absences, it may be a secondary aggrivating factor. As mentioned above - if one does a lot of travel or concert photography, the reduction in travel and concerts leads to less use of your postprocessing tools!
@Morgan_Hardwood has mentioned home remodel as a contributing factor ( see Roadmap for v5.9 · Issue #5632 · Beep6581/RawTherapee · GitHub and Roadmap for v5.9 · Issue #5632 · Beep6581/RawTherapee · GitHub ), but having some sort of status update on that including giving others (like @Thanatomanic or @heckflosse ) permission to take the reins for a release would be nice.
I do plan to continue contributing in the future though.
That looks great yeah, I think making a sticky post with this would help a lot. It’s already buried in the comments.
I’ll create a new topic with the above mentioned info and ask @paperdigits if he can sticky that one for the time being.
EDIT: Done
Hello to all
I have already expressed myself on this subject about a year ago…but nothing is changing, it’s more than desperate.
I’m getting older (I’m going to 75) and my health is very degraded (that’s an understatement). I hope of course that my health will improve and that RT which is a very nice product will find the place it deserves.
Comparisons have been made with Darktable, the results are at least as good, with (often?) simpler solutions, and without making false cognitive inferences (especially on Lab when used with real ones)
As I’ve already said several times I’m not a computer scientist at all, so for me, Github, the compilation guidelines are a bit Chinese, and I work like a monkey - copying what works elsewhere
Thanks to @floessie @Thanatomanic @heckflosse @Pandagrapher @Lawrence37 who give me advice and correct my mistakes,
Thanks to @Wayne_Sutton @Jade_NL @XavAL, thanks also to @Andy_Astbury1 and sometimes ago to @sguyader, and all the people I forget who helped to make this beautiful product
This situation is dramatic, we are in the mercy of someone who seems to ignore the issues, the people in the team, the users, the reputation of RT, etc.
But if I can contribute something, I will.
Thank you again
Jacques
I’ll use RT as long as I’m able to do so. If active development slows down, though, it might be that updates won’t be able to keep up with compatibility issues that will inevitably pop up as time goes on. In the mean time, I should probably keep up with DarkTable releases and be prepared to use that at some point in the future. I really prefer the layout and features of RT, though. It just works for me.
Hello Rick, have a look at Art as well, the interface looks a lot like RawTherapee.
Thanks for the reply. Yes, I have seen it. My question is if RT dies out will ART follow shortly afterward? It’s my understanding that ART is somewhat of a fork of RT. Hopefully I understand that correctly. I do like the more complex options that RT provides, but I should give ART a go at some point.
@Rick :
ART can exist without RawTherapee if it might come to that. One thing that might need to be brought over from RT to ART are parts of RawPedia.
At a certain point @agriggio decided to fork and create a derivative of RawTherapee. It is, to my knowledge, basically a one man show, but it is rather actively maintained/developed (I see commits coming by at a rather regular basis).
Maybe @agriggio can shed some light on how much, if any, cross-pollination is going between the two.
We have backported some things, Alberto has perhaps taken some DCP’s from us, but otherwise, there is no collaboration as far as I am aware.
I talk to @heckflosse and we share ideas and code when there is the chance. Apart from that, I am happy if the RT devs take whatever they see fit, and similarly I’m not afraid to “steal” code from RT.
That said, it is true that the two projects are at this point completely independent and there’s no plan to keep them in sync.
Hope this clarifies
I have pointed people to ART when they ask me what is up with RT. I also remind them ART is RT for Alberto. (Thanks for sharing your fork anyway. 
)
I forgot to add: I welcome any kind of contribution, and there are a number of people who regularly do that (e.g. @srgmro, @paulmatth and others for translations, @Hombre for code, @gaaned92 for Windows builds, and many more for bug reports and suggestions)
Look, I understand why it happens, I do not want to discourage people from trying something else, and I like Alberto’s work a lot. But I find it moderately annoying that every time an issue with RT comes up, people see that as an opportunity to openly advertise ART. This does not help in the slightest to keep the RT project active, it might even do the opposite and help propagate the idea that it is getting old and dead and you’d better look elsewhere to satisfy your needs.
Where’s a link to ART? I’d like to check it out. Thanks.
Don’t fret. It isn’t a competition. I only recommend it to people who want to quit pursuing RT. The referral to ART is letting the apple fall closer to the tree, so when RT is back to its normal releasing self, these people will go back to it, hopefully.
It has its own section in the forum. Take a look there.
That was certainly not my intention, sorry. I merely replied to a direct request for clarification. In fact, I agree that it is at least curious that when people ask a question about tool X they often get “you should use Y instead” as an answer, regardless of the actual question…
Hello, I only reacted to this quote by @Rick. If he prefers the layout and features of RT over Darktable, then I suggest to have a look at Art, as the layout is practical similar and many of the features of RT are still there.
This was not an attempt to “lurk users away from RT”, as I’m not in the business of “growing market share” at all, why should I? One grabs the tool that works, be it RT, DT, Art or dcraw or whatever.
Btw, I worked many years on the RT project: documentation (the first manual for v3.0), translation (Dutch), testing, bug reporting, spam cop for the then RT forum, helping users out, etc, and I still have the latest dev release on my pc so I keep an eye on what’s going on (or !on ). So not a single intention to discourage people to use RawTherapee.