launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 13 October 2011 00:42, Benji York <benji.york@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 9:16 AM, Abel Deuring
> <abel.deuring@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> I tried to get an overview of our current usage of feature flags: Which
>> flags appear in https://launchpad.net/+feature-rules, which flags are
>> documented in lp.services.features.flags.flag_info, which flags appear
>> somewhere in the code base without appearing in flag_info. This is what
>> I found:
>
> Thanks for doing this.  We certainly need to keep the feature flags
> gardened.

They do need to be gardened, but they don't necessarily _all_ need to
be garbage collected.  Other sites that use them seem to find it
useful to keep some of them around in case it turns out to be useful
later on.  I'm wondering a bit why Launchpad seems to be mostly using
them for progressive roll out and then deleting them.

Perhaps it's just natural that the majority of flags will be short
lived.  Or is there anything we could do that would make it less
intrusive to keep them around?

Also, Abel's mail makes me think we could easily change
<https://launchpad.net/+feature-info> to show the date the flag was
last changed, by reading FeatureFlagChangelogEntry, if that would be
useful.

m