GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 496944
Plugins should probably be called Extensions
Last modified: 2008-05-22 21:59:15 UTC
In an effort to get GNOME applications that support Plugins, Extensions, Addins, etc., to have a consistent name, I propose using the name "Extensions" [1]. From comment #18 on my blog post about the subject [1], I conclude: a) There seems to be complete agreement that Add-ins, Add-ons, or anything that could be hyphenized is out of the question. Looks funny too. b) That pretty much leaves us with “Extensions” and “Plugins.” c) “Extensions” seems to be best suited for internationalization, and you can’t really mess it up (I’d love to see someone spell it Exten-sions). “Plugins” degrades across cultural boundaries [2]. That said, I don’t think getting into a deep analysis of the vague differences between Extensions and Plugins is necessary. For all intents and purposes, they convey the same thing. [1] http://abock.org/2007/11/14/plugins-addins-extensions-oh-my/ [2] The fact that "Plugins" is very hard to translate was brought up by a number of people. "Extensions" apparently does not have this problem (comment #8): "I vote for Extensions. In Italian you can’t really translate plugin, thus one has got to let it untraslated. Every time I use the word “plugin” I have to spend 5 min explaining it. So, besides being very culturally insensitive, it’s time consuming as well."
I'd like to work on this bug. A few questions though: 1. There are a few instances in PlayerEngine.cs and GstErrors.cs; are those names changeable or are they getting the error names from upstream? 2. What will integration with Mono.AddIns do here? As far as I understand, once we click on Edit | Manage Extensions, we're bringing up a Mono.AddIns window, not a Banshee one, so can we unify the wording therein? 3. Would you be interested in this making its way into banshee-stable also? I can work up a patch for that. I'm attaching an incomplete patch for trunk, just to get this started.
Created attachment 100856 [details] [review] 'Extensions' patch for trunk Here are a handful of instances I found. I did not include the instances mentioned above in my first question.
aaron, seems like you collected some good arguments. can we please try to get a GNOME wide consensus, please (probably d-d-l)? (but application wide is definitely a good first step.)
(In reply to comment #3) > aaron, seems like you collected some good arguments. can we please try to get a > GNOME wide consensus, please (probably d-d-l)? > (but application wide is definitely a good first step.) Aaron: I'd be happy to help out/speak up where I can also, if you want. But what's d-d-l?
(In reply to comment #4) > (In reply to comment #3) > > aaron, seems like you collected some good arguments. can we please try to get a > > GNOME wide consensus, please (probably d-d-l)? > > (but application wide is definitely a good first step.) > > Aaron: I'd be happy to help out/speak up where I can also, if you want. > > But what's d-d-l? > The desktop-devel-list mailing list: http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Thanks Sandy. Relevant thread: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2007-December/msg00152.html
http://library.gnome.org/devel/gdp-style-guide/stable/gnome-glossary-generic-terms.html.en The currently recommended terminology in Gnome is "plugin". If the community feels strongly that "extension" is a better word, then we can change the Style Guide. But please, let's not have individual applications making this change without a change to the Style Guide.
The 1.0 series is definitely using extension (and we are using it internally for class names, etc). Cosing.