Re: Unifying name for Plugins/Extensions/etc.

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2007-12-19 at 17:37 -0500, Andrew Conkling wrote:
> 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.")
> 
Since plugin and extension are effectively synonomous,
what's to stop the Italian translators for using their
"extension" word for "plugin"?

(I'm not trying to oppose the use of "extension", but
this particular argument just doesn't make much sense
to me.)

--
Shaun