People don't realise that this is asking for a vast amount of work. You don't push the Stable button. It's many many hours of hard work, with no guarantee of success, and almost a guarantee of many frustrating, hard problems to solve. Since this is a volunteer project that is probably asking someone to devote several months of their spare time. Per feature.
I think people genuinely don't realise how much they are asking for, so I am not trying to criticise the people asking. Just trying to explain why it can be annoying for devs
You don't know it, but you're actually asking: "Please don't spend any time with your friends and family for the next few months, I want more free stuff"...
Names_are_hard,
You may not know that but Danne and I have been working together for more than a year on improving and refining the latest experimental ML builds for the 100D and the 5D3. In this process, Danne has provided the coding and I have tested every new release and provided prompt feedback to him so that he knows what is working and what not and what should be fixed or improved. This has taken him and me countless hours of hard work and exchange of hundreds of personal messages, so I understand very well your words and also know very well what I am talking about and what I ask for. Yes, there was a lot of frustration on both parts sometimes but I dare say that, thanks to this joint collaborative effort, these two cameras are now the most powerful and reliable ML capable machines after the EOS-M.
I have been doing this for two reasons:
1) My impression is that developers do not receive enough feedback from users on their latest work. Sometimes it takes months before a user reports an issue or provides general feedback und this does not only slow down ML development but also demotivates developers to support one camera or another. A1ex, I can very well understand your frustration in that respect. So, I thought, if I cannot help with coding, I should at least try to help as best as I can with testing ML on the two cameras that I have access to - the 100D that I own and the 5D3 that I can borrow whenever needed.
2) This one concerns the "Stability button" issue. What can be more annoying to a videographer than a camera crash in the middle of an important shootout? You try to change a setting and the camera crashes. You reinstall the battery and turn the camera on and it crashes again. You reset the config file, load the modules and adjust settings and after a few more clips, you experience the same crash ... In my experience, the worst thing that can happen to a photographer or a film maker is a camera issue that happens during an important shootout, making it impossile to get the job done. As I have stated several times in the past, stability issues have been reason number 1 why so many people abandoned ML and transfered to other cameras. I know, many people will say - you did not pay a penny for using ML, so what are you complaining about? Well, is that the way how ML should work? I fully agree that there is no such thing as the perfectly stable build. I also agree that our developers do not have the time and capacity to release a perfectly stable build. But, I am also convinced that, in a good collaboration between developers and testers, ML can be made stable enough to the extent that users can rely on it to get their filming jobs done. A perfect example for that is the EOS-M which I had the opportunity to play around with a while ago. You just turn the camera on, select a setting, push the record button and film right away with no issues at all. Yes, you may experience a crash or a corrupt frame ocasionally but in the end of the day you know, thanks to ML, your camera has done a great job. In my understanding, this is how ML should work. And if it works that way, developers will know that their efforts were not for nothing and will continue enjoying the appreciation of the community. In that respect, I wish, developers were a little more tolerant and patient with testers even if they sometimes fail to provide all the relevant feedback information. An insufficient test report is still better than no report at all.
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Since English is not my mother tongue, I am not sure if I expressed my thoughts properly. If someone felt offended by my words, I appologize for them.