feature flags

[ThomasWaldmann]

It just came to my mind how we could implement feature flags with much less UI and much less work to implement that UI.

Currently we have these feature flags:

• speaker tick
• led tick
• display on
• startup sound

Considering #106 we might also need a "rgb led" feature flag.

To avoid having to add 1 web form element per feature (which might be more work than the feature itself), we could just have 1 string form element, like:

Features: display,tick,melody,led,...

In the software, we would just split that string and checking for a feature flag is then just:

display_enabled = 'display' in feature_list   # pseudo code

[ThomasWaldmann]

If we want something more powerful, we could even have something like argparse (not sure how that is called for C programs) and have that feature string look like command line arguments / options.

[rexfue]

Sounds nice. But how should the string be entered correctly on the small smartphone keyboard? And isn't that a bit anachronistic? Today everything should be clickable, right?

[ThomasWaldmann]

I also don't like typing on a smartphone, but there are people who typo tons of messages on smartphones...

[jensliebau]

Is a feature list sufficient?

Of cause rebuilding WebUI for each and every feature is a lot of work. But on the pro side information could be structured.

Enable Dislay, Tick or even RGB LED (#106) might be just ja checkbox, there might be more complex UI necessary for other features (#214) like "An eigene API senden" or "Senden an InfluxDB" would require more than one input field wich need to be grouped.