I have been thrilled with ML since I first installed it on my 7D but when the exciting 5D raw features started to come through it felt a bit like the 7D had been orphaned. I am not complaining, not for a second. I was, and still am, very impressed. I was booting ML every time I started my camera and accepted the fact that the 7D was old, difficult to work with and probably not as common with ML users as other cameras. I was content and grateful for the work that had been done.
Then I purchased a third party AC adaptor and discovered that loading ML for the 7D while in an alpha stage confused booting via the AC adaptor. I couldn't use ML with the adaptor as it stood and had to forgo using it whenever I wanted to use ML. I accepted this, of course, but one day I was browsing the ML forums to deal with some other issue when I saw mention of TL. I installed it (at my own risk, as is regularly and legitimately stated) simply to allow autobooting. Not really understanding why there was a separate version I became more and more excited as raw recording started to work. I continued to occasionally install TL updates whenever I saw that there were more features I might be interested in and when the testing done by others showed the build to be relatively stable.
After a while I was content and settled on a version. I set the camera to the best possible performance and was very happy with the situation.
But then the audio feature with raw appeared - I was in heaven! Everything I could possibly ask for out of this creaking old system was now possible and I was recording real work with the camera. Again, I settled on a version but came back occasionally to see if there were any performance improvements and/or bug fixes. In the meantime (January) I was recording raw with backup production audio into MLV rec and couldn't believe my luck. I even decided not to buy an upgrade, I had 90% of what I wanted on my 7D already - I could wait.
That's when I started to see the comments about forks and 'rogue' builds. Although I am naïve about open source code versioning systems, it made sense to me. I saw the work done to merge the code into the main build and, wanting to be a responsible member of the community, installed the new ML builds with the intention of switching over and that would be that. However, the performance was disappointing and there was no audio so I 'downgraded' back to TL. I suppose this is one of the reasons that the ML team wants to keep things together - to keep expectations reasonable whilst keeping the code base consistent but it seems the horse has bolted on the principle here.
As someone who (very gratefully) uses the work of both A1ex (and Gagg0 and team) as well as 1%, I am hugely disappointed that it has come to this situation. I would very much like it if we could keep the TL work within the community until it's possible to merge into the ML stream. Although from what I have read here it's not a simple process and may not ever happen completely.
OK, I understand why it's important and agree with all the arguments but we have a mostly working TL version with excellent features and good performance along with information from people who have tested in quite a lot of detail to tell us what the best settings are. My concern is that all the hard work that has been done will go to waste and we'll never see equivalence on the main ML stream for the 7D. As people are doing this in their spare time I can't imagine what the motivation to improve the 7D build would be, it's an old camera and is about to be declared end-of-line, it doesn't have the x-factor of the 5D III or whatever is going to replace it. The TL version seems to me to be almost there with every possible theoretical improvement (maybe I am I wrong, are there any other magic features being considered for this camera?). A few more of the modules added and a few bug fixes would make it as close to the ML main stream as it's likely to be feature-wise (this is in my somewhat ignorant understanding - I know nothing about coding beyond basic HTML although I think I understand in principle the issues raised by A1ex). Perhaps with these tweaks it then could be frozen?
I'll accept it if I'm told to get back in my box here, I'm sure I don't fully understand the details. But I am very grateful to 1% for all the additional work, without any reduction in my admiration for the main team. I have effectively had two new cameras for free in the last year, first the original ML and then TL. I am once again prepared to settle on the latest, most stable version of TL if I have to but it feels like it would be a bit of a shame.
