[kijin]

What's the smallest unit of functionality to which your principle applies?

For example, each comment on HN has a line on top that contains buttons like "parent", "prev", "next", "flag", "favorite", etc. depending on context. Suppose I might one day want to remove the "flag" functionality. Should each button be its own file? What about the "comment header" template file that references each of those button files?

[jpitz]

I think that if you continue along the logical progression of the parent poster, then maybe the smaller units of functionality would be represented by simple ranges of lines of text. Given that, deleting a single button would ideally mean a single contiguous deletion from a file, versus deleting many disparate lines.

[balamatom]

The `comment_header` template would iterate over the files in `comment_header.d/*`, which would, admittedly, need forced sorted naming:

100_parent.template

150_context.template

200_prev_next.template

300_flag.template

350_favorite.template

Looks odd with the numbering, no?

But then you get the added benefit of being able to refer to them by numbers, just "100" or "300" without having to glue humanlang inflection, declension, punctuation onto identifiers that happen to be words...

Some places where you can see this pattern: BASIC's explicit line numbering; non-systemd init systems.

[sverhagen]

Maybe the buttons shouldn't be their own files, but the backend functionality certainly could be. I don't do this, but I like the idea.