Let me offer the following paralell. I loved how the Mozilla folks avoided the Frankestein and solved the issue of specific needs with their extension system in Firefox. Firefox only ships with essential functionality, that pretty much everyone will find useful. And if there is a need for a specific functionality for a specific user base, somebody sits down and writes an extension for it. Such extensions are developed separately from the main app.
He goes on to mention the prospect of “extenion” themes like gnome-icon-theme-artists and gnome-icon-theme-hackers. The parallel, however, falls apart in that I can load up all the plugins I want in Firefox. Let’s postulate these extension themes:
- gnome-icon-theme-artists – Differentiate between different image types
- gnome-icon-theme-hackers – Differentiate between different source and object file formats
- gnome-icon-theme-audiophiles – Differentiate between different audio types
- gnome-icon-theme-network – Differentiate between different types of network servers
It’s a well established fact that I am not an artist. I once made a pretty decent scale drawing of a pixel. That’s about the best I can do. But I am a programmer, and an audiophile, and one of those weird people who uses Gnome on a wacky heterogeneous network. So I want to load up three of those.
But it isn’t a plugin system. It’s a set of independent extension themes. So we’ll have to have funky conglomerate extension themes, like gnome-icon-theme-audiophile-hacker-network. With just the four I listed, we get 2^4 = 16 extension themes. Yikes.
