I'm in the midst of an ongoing debate and am curious to hear the opinions
of others.
Do you make any distinction between the words bundle and plugin? Do you
prefer to use one over the other? Why?
We used to say that "bundle" was anything that was pure OSGI and and a
plug-in was anything that used Eclipse specific functionality such as the
plugin.xml file. But at EclipseCon, Tom Watson was using them
interchangeably and when I question him about it he said that he does not
see a need to make a distinction.
I'm inclined to think that the word "plugin" is just a hangover from the
pre-3.0 days and that the two words can be used interchangeably and
newcomers should be taught that both words refer to the same thing.
Neither word should be ignored in training/education so as to keep people
from being confused when they get out into the real word and see both.
Incidentally, the course outline[1] for the RCP Training series[2] only
contains the word "plugin".
What do you think?
(I may cross post this to eclipse.platform to see if the folks there feel
any differently.)