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Development Builds

Use a development build if you want to test the newest features and latest changes and if buggy behavior and lack of processing profile backward compatibility is not a problem for you.

Development builds can be downloaded from several locations:

• The official GitHub repository.
• The unofficial builds by André Gauthier.
• The unofficial macOS builds by Richard Barber.

How do development builds compare to stable builds? We make new "development" builds almost daily, and every few months we release a new "stable" version, which is nicely packaged with all known important bugs fixed. Any bugs found in the latest stable version will be subsequently fixed in the newer development versions. These improvements will accumulate until the next stable release is made several months later, and so on. These development versions are also where we improve existing tools and add new ones, though it takes time to polish them and to make sure they work well out of the box. On the one hand development versions always have the highest number of bugs fixed, but on the other hand the new tools in these versions may be rough and unpolished and new bugs will appear. If you want to try out new features then get the latest development build - you get to take advantage of all the latest bug fixes and you get to test new tools and report problems and ideas back to us at the cost of discovering new bugs. For general use we recommend the latest stable release which gives you a generally more polished experience.

While we try to facilitate processing profile backward compatibility between the latest stable release and the previous stable release (i.e. a processing profile from 5.7 should look the same when used on the same photo in 5.8), there is no effort placed on maintaining compatibility between development versions. This allows us to get work done without being boggled down by such constraints. If stability is key for you, we recommend that you use the latest stable release.

Development build filenames roughly follow this structure:

RawTherapee_branch_tag_commit_date.extension

• Code changes happen several times a day, and each code change is referenced by a unique hash number in the commit - it looks like this: d9ad93c15.
• Each commit happens on a "branch". The main branch is called dev. New features are developed on their own branches, and then merged into dev when ready.
• The "tag" is the human-friendly version of the latest release, e.g. 5.8.