Contributing to Ansel

About discussions

Moved to https://ansel.photos/en/contribute/organization/#communication

Design process

Moved to https://ansel.photos/en/contribute/design/

Code quality

Moved to https://ansel.photos/en/contribute/coding-style/

Context and closing thoughts

The darktable project became high-traffic around 2019 because Lightroom switched to a subscription-based model and darktable had offered Windows versions since 2017 or so. Its main problem was its whole identity and management was, precisely, no management at all and that did not scale well.

Having more people working with you divides the amount of work by that much, until you reach a team of 5-8 persons. At that point, you need to start structuring the collaborations, which means having more work overall because you have to divert resources and time into making it work as a team. This is more overhead, but with no structure, a growing team is actually less efficient than a couple of individuals.

This has actively damaged darktable as a project, leading to much noise in the issues tracker, lots of them without follow-ups, a general lack of rigorous testing and a decrease in code quality as well as in usability and general UI/UX. Bugs get merged faster than they get fixed, and there is just so much activity on the master branch that it's impossible to follow carefully what get merged.

More concerning, the amount of work needed to keep the project afloat is increasing, which is always a bad smell for a project reaching feature-completeness, and some bugs have been there for years now. Some much-needed executive decisions, that would allow to keep the project's ambitions in sync with the available resources, are not made in order to play it nice, which results in overreaching.

Finally, PR get conflicts very fast because different people work on the same parts without dialogue or supervision, and while Git provides some helpers to manage conflicts, ultimately it has to end with a good code reading and manual landmines defusing.

I just want to avoid any of that, and those bad habits now grounded are impossible to change in upstream darktable after 12 years.