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[eclipse-pmc] The Evolution of Eclipse: What's in a name?
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On last week's Eclipse Architecture team call, I brought up the 'plug-in versus bundle' naming issue. This naming issue also came up at this week's PDE team call where we had consensus that deprecating the word plug-in would be a good idea. Furthermore, the new components in PDE (e.g., API Tools) have gone out of their way to not call things plug-ins. I also know the Equinox p2 team struggles with naming problems (e.g., software).
Why is this a problem?
OSGi is finally relevant outside of Eclipse and there's confusion out there. I've witnessed the confusion first hand by working with people in the "field" and trying to get people up to speed on Equinox, Eclipse and OSGi [1]. There has even been some public discussion of renaming Eclipse RCP due to this confusion [2]. In the past, PDE has even had requests to rename it to "BDE" [3] amongst other things [4]. I can go on and on.
My proposal is that we adopt "bundle" and deprecate "plug-in" as the official term.
This issue is becoming of greater concern to me as OSGi's adoption is increasing. In the end, I view that our brand has been hi-jacked [5] a bit by our adopters out there. This is fine, we just have to adapt to this.
I ask that the Eclipse PMC carefully deliberate this issue so we can discuss it at the next Eclipse architecture call. I believe that Jeff McAffer and Tom Watson can share their experiences with this issue. Jeff has a unique perspective of working with various people in industry and seeing this problem first hand. Tom works closely with the OSGi Alliance so he can have an interesting perspective too.
In terms of implementing the proposal, I suggest if we do something, we do it early in the release cycle and communicate it well to our uses. Furthermore, the PDE team is ready to do what it takes to make this happen.
Please advise.
Cheers,
--
Chris Aniszczyk | EclipseSource Austin | +1 860 839 2465
http://twitter.com/eclipsesource |
http://twitter.com/caniszczyk
