Following some counseling from regular member of this forum, Ofnuts, I would like some clarification of just which part of a darktable build to put in the gimp plug-ins folder (~/.config/GIMP/2.10/plug-ins in my environment) so as to be able to invoke darktable when attempting to open a raw file in gimp.
This is a duplicate of a request I have made in the RawTherapee ‘channel’
There has been an issue with 4.6…not sure what you are running … here is one of the reports and I think the current status…
Yes I was aware of this bug report. I am satisfied this means the invocation of dt from GIMP cannot work correctly at present - but this doesn’t help in the future, when a fix is available, if I don’t know which component of dt I have to place in the relevant GIMP plug-in folder.
I wasn’t aware that anything needed to be done. I dont’ really use GIMP much but the few times I did on WIndows I had never done anything it just worked and whatever needed to be in place was…
I have these in the subdirectory of GIMP…again this is windows… Linux might be set up differently??
And I have this which seems to run when I start GIMP…
Disclaimer : the fix is “work in progress” (darktable recognition method (#10572) · Issues · GNOME / GIMP · GitLab) so nobody can tell you what the implementation will actually look like.
You should not need to place any dt component into this folder manually. Should be done by GIMP automatically.
There is no place to put “something” into. Gimp tests an available darktable program and that test was broken in 4.6
That’s all
When it’s all working properly, what happens if you have multiple dt versions installed?
I usually seem to have about 3 at anyone time. 
But I know that’s not a reasonable use case.
The one found via standard path
I can see the parallel to a Linux environment, so I’m interested to know where the exe named ‘file-darktable’ came from.
Thanks for this. I wish I could have read this for myself in some GIMP-supplied documentation… It raises the question of when does GIMP do this, and what causes it to do so? I.e. what conditions have to be satisfied before GIMP executes this activity?
As far as I know it’s setup with any normal install
As told before, gimp tests for an existing darktable program. Nothing copied at all. Calls darktable --version and interprets the returned string. This regex test fails for dt 4.6. In general it will fail, if rawtherapee or darktable binaries can’t be started like this. And it won’t start if darktable has no lua support.
BTW, i didn’t know either a week ago. Just downloaded gimp source and checked …
So in short, you seem to be on the wrong track 
Everything worked fine with DT 4.4, not with 4.6 (Linux Manjaro)
Which just goes to show what a huge gap in capability there is between you and me! and almost certainly explains why I am on the wrong track - my usual state…
btw, as discussed elsewhere on Pixls, I had been trying for some years to persuade gimp. rawtherapee / dt to talk to each other, bidirectionally, under Mint - using various versions from about 20, without success. Somebody else claimed that it was very straightforward under MX Linux. I tried for myself. Took 5 about minutes to achieve what I hadn’t acheived in years with Mint, not aided by the conspicuous lack of documentation or explanation within Gimp. Lesson (partly) learned.
Well, at least i tried to get in contact with the gimp people, don’t know how interested they are. Personally i think they should They could argue, why do darktable devs break stuff? I confess, somehow we did and we could implement some workaround on our side - we will do for 4.6.1 certainly.
I don’t think about a gap in capability, i was just as annoyed / interested as you are. Just downloaded the source tarball and searched for string “darktable” as a guess and voila
