Reporting bugs and issues - darktable-org/darktable GitHub Wiki

To understand what it is to remotely hunt bugs without having access to your computer, please read this: https://discuss.pixls.us/t/dont-report-bugs-contribute-to-bugs-hunting/14911

There are more than 300.000 lines of code inside darktable, that makes more than 300.000 possible causes for each bug. Whenever you report a bug, you need to be accurate, specific and give as many details as you can so we can narrow down the causes.

"Details" mean:

  1. what exactly did you expect ?
  2. what exactly did happen ?
  3. what did you exactly do to make that happen ? (list of modules used, input parameters of modules, …)

Then, we need to know as much as possible about your system:

  1. operating system (name and version). Ex: Windows 10 Family Edition, Ubuntu 18.04 Gnome, etc.
  2. hardware and drivers. Ex: GPU Nvidia GT 750 M with driver Nvidia 440.31, CPU Intel i5 Skylake with Neo OpenCL 2.1.105, etc.
  3. hardware specifications. Ex: 8 GB RAM, SSD 512 GB, etc.
  4. desktop environment (Linux Only). Ex: Gnome shell 2.22, XFCE 4.14, etc.
  5. graphic server (Linux only). Ex: Wayland or Xorg
  6. colour management. Ex: custom-made ICC display profile with DispCal, no colour management, colour management with sRGB standard profile, etc.
  7. the darktable release version number you are actually using.

Finally, don't forget to provide:

  1. backtraces, log files and terminal error messages if any,
  2. screenshots of what happened,
  3. faulty RAW files with their XMP sidecar files.

To speed-up the debugging process, you can also try to troubleshoot the issue yourself:

  1. disable all the modules one by one and see if the problem disappears at some point,
  2. enable/disable OpenCL and see if the problem gets better or worse,
  3. backup and reset darktable configuration in ~/.config/darktable and see if that solves your problem
  4. disable your custom-made ICC profile and switch to default sRGB or Adobe RGB profiles.

If your are building darktable from the sources, don't forget to clean your install directory (/opt/darktable by default) and your building directory (darktable-source/build) before you update/reinstall a newer version.

Bug reports have a template with a list of useful info to fill. You have to use them, or your bug reports will not be read.