Unifying name for Plugins/Extensions/etc.

["Andrew Conkling" <andrew conkling gmail com>]

Andre Klapper thought this would be good discussion based on Aaron Bockover's comments on his blog [1] and some subsequent GNOME bugs [2] discussing the issue. I'm merely an interested party speaking of on Aaron's behalf.

From Aaron's blog:
"I have been thinking about renaming "Plugins" in the UI to something else, such as Extensions. My first thought was, "What does everyone else use?"

That wasn't so helpful:
* Banshee, Totem, gedit: Plugins
* F-Spot, Epiphany, Firefox: Extensions
* Tomboy: Add-ins"

From the bug report:
In an effort to get GNOME applications that support Plugins, Extensions, Addins, etc., to have a consistent name, I propose using the name "Extensions".

 "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. 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.

(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 on the blog): "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.")

[1] http://abock.org/2007/11/14/plugins-addins-extensions-oh-my/
[2] Totem: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=496932
gedit: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=496935
Rhythmbox: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=496945
Tomboy: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=496912
MonoDevelop: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=341845
Banshee: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=496944

Cheers,
Andrew Conkling