> Is it possible to run the development version of dt alongside the
> current stable release?
It is physically possible if you have them installed to different
paths. For example, if you install your OS's packaging of the stable
version of darktable, which probably goes in /usr, and then compile the
development version to install into its default spot of /opt/darktable.
However doing so is dangerous unless you're quite careful, because
development versions may silently upgrade the version of your library
database (or databases if you have multiple ones). Such an upgraded
library database can no longer be opened by the stable release and
there's no way to downgrade the library database[*]. If this happens
to you and you want to run the stable release again (or even an older
version of the development version), you'll be restoring your library
database from backups.
If you're only going to test out the development version every so
often, the safest thing to do is manually save a copy of the library
database before you run the development version. If the stable version
then tells you that it can't deal with your library any more, restore
the library database copy you saved.
As for going back and forth routinely, well, that's obviously more
tricky. Probably the simplest thing to do is use separate library
databases for each darktable (and never accidentally start one with the
other's database), but among other things this means you can't easily
share presets and styles between the stable and development versions
(since those are stored in the library database at current).
- cks
[*: 'no way' is a little bit strong if you're familiar with SQLite and
SQL and can read through the darktable code to carefully determine
the database schema changes between database versions. I managed to
manually downgrade my library database once in an extreme situation,
but I never want to have to (try to) do that again. And some database
changes may be genuinely irreversible.
]
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