Its an issue of what a “plug-in” is — is it a way for the program to internally load more modules as it needs them, or is it meant to be a public, published interface?
For example, the “system call” interface could be considered a “plug-in interface”, and running a user mode program under Linux could easily be construed as running a “plug-in” for the Linux kernel. No? And there, I obviously absolutely agree with you 100%: the interface is published, and it’s meant for external and independent users. It’s an interface that we go to great lengths to preserve as well as we can, and it’s an interface that is designed to be independent of kernel versions. But maybe somebody wrote his program with the intention to dynamically load “actors” as they were needed, as a way to maintain a good modularity, and to try to keep the problem spaces well-defined. In that case, the “plug-in” may technically follow all the same rules as the system call interface, even though the author doesn’t intend it that way. So I think it’s to a large degree a matter of intent, but it could arguably also be considered a matter of stability and documentation (i.e., “require recompila
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