Branches are difficult to reason about? Yes, I agree.
Are branches necessary to make the product behave in a different way in some circumstances? Most of the time.
Do those circumstances require a branch? Unless you’re super confident about some part of code, yes? But why would you be?
Runtime configuration is not about making QA easy. It’s introduced because QA has been hell already so you can control rollout of code which you know wasn’t properly QA’d - or it was but turns out the thing you built isn’t the thing users want and the release cycle is too long to deploy a revert.
I’d say ‘branches are bad but alternatives are worse’.
Comments
Sorry, not buying it.
Branches are difficult to reason about? Yes, I agree.
Are branches necessary to make the product behave in a different way in some circumstances? Most of the time.
Do those circumstances require a branch? Unless you’re super confident about some part of code, yes? But why would you be?
Runtime configuration is not about making QA easy. It’s introduced because QA has been hell already so you can control rollout of code which you know wasn’t properly QA’d - or it was but turns out the thing you built isn’t the thing users want and the release cycle is too long to deploy a revert.
I’d say ‘branches are bad but alternatives are worse’.
There is nothing worse than code with dozens to hundreds of possible configuration states that you must test for every new feature.
If your QA was bad before, you've made it worse.
"I can toggle it off without pushing a new release" is a terrible bandaid for the problem.