Richard's preferred name of "PEA" (AKA anything that's not LADSPA2) got me to thinking. What about abstracting it up one level and calling the directory + .so files + manifest thing a POD (Plugin Object and Description). Theres nothing particularly audio specific about the high level construct, its "just" that we don't have a concrete ABI for dealing with sills, video etc.
This means that what we think of as a "LADSPA2" plugin would be a "LADSPA POD". The directory would have a .pod extension. POD seems like a nice word to me, plenty of scope for puns, short and "pod plugin" on google doesn't come up with anything much. The only audio related things for "pod" I could see are: a guitar effects processor called a PODxt (there was a POD historically), an audio I/O device called a Firepod, and the documentation for the LADSPA Perl module. Perl docs are the only non-coincidental hits for "LADSPA POD". I could juggle the description stuff around the seperate pod-ness from ladspa-ness, it's not hard, but also not neccesary. There is a small name clash with Perl, which uses .pod for it's documentation format, but I dont think that's really an issue, our .pods will be found in POD_PATH (eg. /usr/lib/pod/, ~/.pod/) and be will be directories. Thoughts? - Steve