I’ve been looking at a lot of projects that are BeOS related and it seems to me that everything that isn’t an app is being called a kit.
This abuse of the terminology is going to confuse many people (old and new users alike). The breaking up of system components into sub catagories such as the original kits was a great organizational idea on Be’s part. What I suggest is that we continue that tradition by treating larger subsections of the system as kits.
As such I believe that the originals should stay. Only larger more globally scaled systems should be allowed to use the “kit” metaphore. Smaller subsections of these larger kits could be called something else. I think they should be called bags.
So for example instead of the imkit. It should be the im bag, which would be a part of the web kit. Another example would be the interface kit. This original kit could be divided into bags for widgets, graphics, helpers, etc…
It will take a while to bang out the proper terminology for these new systems, but if we continue to call every added feature a “kit” it is going to lead to having dozens, or hundreds of kits. This defeats the original organizational intentions of having the metaphore in the first place.
Just my thoughts.
