At the end of the day the issue is not with in which repository the database is developed and how often it is updated, but how the library and software that relies on it are shipped.

The vast majority of users that use lensfun are doing so by downloading a Windows/Mac installer, Flatpak package etc. of the actual software they want to use, and this package also contains both lensfun and its profiles. Then there is a group of people who get lensfun and its profiles packaged on their own as part of their long-term Linux distributions. And finally there's a small minority that uses bleeding-edge rolling-release Linux distributions.

The only group profiting from a split and frequent lensfun database package releases would be the last - and smallest - one. Their maintainers would pick them up and ship them often enough. Everybody else basically has to resort to the lensfun-update-data utility because their chosen method of getting lensfun on their computers will always come with a significant delay. But in most cases that doesn't actually even work. The software that ships lensfun as a dependency either doesn't even ship lensfun-update-data and doesn't provide an alternative way to update the profiles from remote (e.g. a button in the GUI application). Or it often sets everything up in such a way that the path where lensfun-update-data stores the updated database is ignored.

One of the best strategies I've seen is in the darktable Flatpak on Flathub. It pulls in the current lensfun release, but replaces the database with the current state from the master branch during the build. So every darktable release on Flathub always includes the most current database snapshot available at the time of build, and because darktable releases quite often (about every three months) the delta is not that big.

The most important reasons for finally releasing 0.4.0 with database version 2 compatibility are:

Some existing profiles cannot be converted to database version 1 because they rely on features (e.g. ) that don't exist in version 1, and are therefore removed during conversion.
lensfun‑convert‑lcp creates version 2 profiles that don't work with the 0.3.x branch and often also cannot be converted to database version 1.

Any plans to make new release? #1033

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