Re: Unifying name for Plugins/Extensions/etc.

[Sankar P <psankar novell com>]

On Wed, 2007-12-19 at 17:33 -0600, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > (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 will vote for continuing the usage of "Plugins" over any new jargon.
Evolution, gedit, rhythmbox, gvim, anjuta all use the word Plugins.
IIRC, Eclipse, Mono-develop, compiz-fusion as well.

>From my past experience, Using a new jargon may not be so well-received
by users. We changed VFolders in Evolution to "Search Folders". Still
there are a lots of people using both the terms interchangeably. And all
the code refers as vfolders, so developers end-up using VFolders more
frequently than Search-folders.

If translation is tough in Italian for the word "Plugins", as Shaun
said, why can't we use the Italian word for "extension" in that place ?

Changing the term Plugin means, All the dependent user-docs, wiki pages,
developer-docs, FAQ pages, screenshots should also be updated. Some
distros ship plugins as seperate RPMs/packages. So these rpm/package
names should also be changed. IMHO it is too much of an effort with
lesser benefits. 

-- 
Sankar P
Evolution Plugins (Extensions ?) Maintainer