Re: Unifying name for Plugins/Extensions/etc.

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2007-12-20 at 11:40 +0530, Sankar P wrote:
> 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.

<off-topic>
Well, since you mention working on Evolution, I just can't
resist this.  Notice the extra ">" preceding "From" at the
start of the above paragraph?  IIRC, this is used to escape
a line starting with "From" in mailbox files, since "From"
is used to start a new email.  Why doesn't evolution strip
this escape when it displays the message to me?
</off-topic>

> 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. 

Changing terminology is always a bigger undertaking than
people think it is, and the end result is usually far less
comprehensive than people anticipated.  Witness:

* We recommend using "folder" over "directory", but the
term "directory" is still very prominent.
* We changed "shade" to "roll up", but among the shaders
I know, none of them ever say "roll up".
* We recommend against using "combo box".  As if.
* We recommend using "point to" instead of "hover".  Yet
another losing battle.

I could go on.  In general, I think "extension" is a far
better word than "plugin".  The question is, is it worth
the bound-to-partially-fail effort?  (Then again, it seems
we're partially failing at maintaining the status quo.) 

--
Shaun