Ansel is what Darktable 4.0 could have been if it didn’t die of feature creep .
Between 2020 and 2023, Darktable has suffered massive code additions of peripheral features, often ill-coded, poorly designed and penalizing usability, performance and maintenance. Too many workarounds failed to fix bugs, but layered new problems on top of legacy code : welcome in maintenance nightmare.
I used Ansel for a while, and I agree that Darktable is suffering from feature creep. Ansel right away had some usability improvements. But the amount of regressions introduced was wild. The anger you can read in the messaging was apparently also employed to cut code, and things got flaky. In the end some features I used stopped working in all releases I tried, and I went back to Darktable. Maybe Ansel is stabilizing now, and I should try again.
They got beef!
There's a lot of well reasoned, but pretty caustic, developer blog notes for the project.
Refreshing breath of honest air, imnho. I don't agree with the author in all things, but I enjoy how well and directly they express their viewpoints.
Right?! And the rest of the README continues like that. Must be some juicy history here
And I think this was a few years back. Imagine still having that in your readme.
I'm digging their Sentry charts. That's the kind of discipline we need more of. Stability is a feature.
I used Ansel for a while, and I agree that Darktable is suffering from feature creep. Ansel right away had some usability improvements. But the amount of regressions introduced was wild. The anger you can read in the messaging was apparently also employed to cut code, and things got flaky. In the end some features I used stopped working in all releases I tried, and I went back to Darktable. Maybe Ansel is stabilizing now, and I should try again.
Looks interesting - does it have better library management than DarkTable?