I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
I feel that adding features as soft dependencies like that is generally a bad idea, because your code now contains the new code, the old code and extra code to figure out which one to use. Every time you integrate a new, new feature, you'll need to make sure it works with the legacy code too.
I can't see how that is going to work in a big project. You'll have to spend extra time and resources unpicking the legacy stuff at some point anyway, right?
If it works for you and your team, sure, go for it, but I think most people would be better off using separate feature branches.
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Aren't you describing technical debt?
I feel that adding features as soft dependencies like that is generally a bad idea, because your code now contains the new code, the old code and extra code to figure out which one to use. Every time you integrate a new, new feature, you'll need to make sure it works with the legacy code too.
I can't see how that is going to work in a big project. You'll have to spend extra time and resources unpicking the legacy stuff at some point anyway, right?
If it works for you and your team, sure, go for it, but I think most people would be better off using separate feature branches.