As the number of plugins increases, it becomes useful to have a list of plugins sorted by name.  Currently the following code returns a list sorted by some index other than the name strings:

    registry = gst.registry_get_default()
    registrylist = registry.get_feature_list(gst.ElementFactory)
    registrylist.sort()

Results in this:

typefind
tee
filesink
queue
identity
filesrc
fdsink
fdsrc
fakesink
fakesrc
capsfilter
xvimagesink
ximagesink
...

The fastest option is probably to have gst.PluginFeature have it's own __cmp__ method like this:

def __cmp__(self, other):
    return cmp(self.get_name(), other.get_name())

This will make registrylist.sort() result in a list sorted alphabetically by name.

Then again, this may be something that should be added to the gstreamer core and is inappropriate for gst-python.  

The workaround is this:

registrylist.sort(lambda x, y: cmp(x.get_name(), y.get_name()))