Github user aljoscha commented on the issue:
https://github.com/apache/flink/pull/5735
I think I'd favour the second approach because the default value is closer
to where the return value is used. If it's define "far away" when defining the
state descriptor it's easier for code to get out of sync. But I think both
approaches would work well.
Though I'm also a bit skeptical about adding the feature again unless a lot
of people absolutely want it. I can see that it might be useful but in the past
we prematurely added a lot of API because we thought people might need it and
now we have a lot of legacy stuff that we need to keep (for example all the
"source" methods on `StreamingExecutionEnvironment` and the various `write*()`
methods on `DataStream`. Still not opposed, though.
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