Just installed Magic Lantern on the 5D3 - some initial notes

Started Sep 29, 2013 | Discussions thread
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Re: Just installed Magic Lantern on the 5D3 - some initial notes
In reply to RS_RS, Oct 2, 2013

RS_RS wrote:

RedYeti wrote:

ML is NOT a "one-way-or-brick" installation. He CAN stop using ML, he just can't remove the bootflag (well he can, but the risk is probably unacceptably high right now). Please stop beating that dead horse.

I understand what you are saying, and certainly admire the efforts made by the ML development community to get inside the Canon firmware. However, the bootflag issue is very far from being a dead horse. It means that ML does NOT pass the test of being easily and safely removable. Yes, you may be able to run with it or run without it, but if installing it has modified your camera in a way that can be reversed only as a high-risk operation, then it is malware. I think the problem is that what the developers are interested in is the fascinating business of working out how to do the tweaks rather than the boring task of quality assurance. In a previous life I ran a large IT-based agency where we developed a lot of our own very specialised software working at CMM Level 3 or better, so this is a world that I know about.

I agree that not being able to easily disable the bootflag is a serious issue on the 5D3 (it can be removed from other cameras). Not sure I'd go so far as to call it malware

The dead horse I was referring to wasn't the bootflag, apologies if that's how it sounded. I was referring to uninstalling ML - you can uninstall ML simply by removing or reformatting the card it is on. From a technical point of view the bootflag is a separate thing - it's a Canon feature that is there for development, debugging and servicing, independent of ML. ML just happens to use the bootflag to kickstart itself on startup. That's why I have been talking about it as something separate from ML itself. Note that earlier builds of ML didn't depend on the bootflag at all, rather you would have to manually "flash" it from card into memory every time you wanted to use it. I'm sure it's still quite possible to create an updated build of ML that behaves the same way and hence would have no bootflag requirement but AFAIK this hasn't been done. Personally I much prefer the current bootflag approach, it's 1000x more convenient though with the one obvious downside.

That said, I can see that end users probably couldn't care less about the technical distinction between ML and the bootflag and they treat them as one and the same. I do understand that view and I can only hope that a good solution to disabling the bootflag on the 5D3 becomes available soon to make it a moot point. From a dev point of view I can see why creating that solution isn't an interesting problem - it is a risky piece of development to tackle and they're very unlikely to want to disable their own bootflag anyway so there isn't a huge amount of incentive to do the work.

Totally agree with you regarding the devs preferring hacking the camera than dealing with support, it seems to be something that many people don't fully appreciate or accept the consequences of. Having worked on many software projects myself from casual open source to high availability financial applications, I can imagine CMM Level 3+ requires a vastly more considered approach to software development than a project like ML

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