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by keybored
501 days ago
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One sense of feature flag that I am familiar with (not from experience) is in trunk based development where they are used to integrate new code (with a feature flag) which is relatively untested. Or just not fully developed. That’s an alternative to longer-lived feature branches which are only merged until it is either fully finished or (going further) fully tested. Hard-coding that kind of feature flag makes sense. Because a later revision will delete the feature flags outright (removing the branches). There also seems to be feature flags in the sense of toggling on and off features. Then hard-coding makes less sense. |
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That's actually the only sense of "feature flag" I was aware of before this discussion.
> Hard-coding that kind of feature flag makes sense. Because a later revision will delete the feature flags outright (removing the branches).
Yup. And, AFAIK, is what "feature flag" means.
> There also seems to be feature flags in the sense of toggling on and off features. Then hard-coding makes less sense.
So "feature flag" has now taken on -- taken over? -- the meaning of just plain "flag" (or "switch" or "toggle" or whatever), as in ordinary everyday run-time configuration? What is this development supposed to be good for? We used to have two distinct distinguishable terms for two distinct distinguishable things; now we apparently don't any more. So we've lost a bit of precision from the language we use to discuss this stuff. Have we, in exchange, gained anything?