>What should be done IMO is to ask the GNOME Documentation team to make a decision on the name, and
>the usability team to make a decision on the interface, and then file bugs against all modules that
>are incosistent.

But Firefox for example is considered part of the “Gnome suite” and does not belong to Gnome. So I think it’s better to accomodate to the conventions of it:

* Plugins: Embeddable content.
* Addons: Extensions and Themes.
* Extensions: New features (but one thing I don’t know is if an Extension can bundle a Plugin).

So another vote for Extensions because I guess most Gnome applications don’t have “Themes”, right? I believe they are handled at a GTK level.

>Is there consideration to rename Mono.Addins to Mono.Extensions?

However, I’m thinking now that the term “Extension” is usually used for parts of a program that can be separated and, IIRC in the case of MonoDevelop there are AddIns that are part of the core, and cannot be separated (I think that the AddIns that can be separated are inside a folder called “Extras” in the SVN repo of MonoDevelop).

So it’s not always good to have consistency. Thus, we shouldn’t change MonoAddins to MonoExtensions and neither MonoDevelop Addins to MonoDevelop Extensions, IMHO.

>@Alessandro: great point about localization. -1 for Plugins, +1 for Extensions.

It happens the same in Spanish.

The decision to use “plug-ins” instead of “plugins” or other terms was taken several years ago after some debate. Before that, the hyphenation was not really consistent. Using “extensions” was not possible because GIMP already uses that term for something else: extensions are similar to plug-ins except that they are always active (their process is always running), contrary to the plug-ins that are only running when invoked from the menus (their process exits when they are done).

It is possible, although unlikely in the short term, that the differences between extensions and plug-ins could disappear when the GIMP API is redesigned. But it is unlikely that GIMP will use anything else than “plug-ins” in the foreseeable future.

PS: Like the new look by the way.

This whole debate is around a word that describes incorporating additional functionality into the main software, be that fundamental change, minor improvements, additional ways of doing things, etc. All of these cases involve extending the capabilities of the software; you don’t plug anything in anywhere.

Extensions is the perfect word to use, so my vote goes for Extensions. It also makes the most grammatical sense (to me anyway).

Now we need an “extension” icon in gnome-icon-theme…

The way I see it, Plugins and Extensions are two different mechanisms. If the additional code you introduce to an application can completely change the behaviour, look and functionality of the application, “Extension” seems like a good fit. If the code lives in a very restricted area and environment of the application and can’t really do anything but add new and perhaps modify existing functionality, I think “Plugin” is a good fit.