Comment 5 for bug 1291738

I've actually made a stab at this back in the day and my resolution was that Switchboard itself needs improvements for this to fly - or for Switchboard to be usable, actually.

You see, gnome-control-center has plug invocations like "gnome-control-center sound". Switchboard in Luna had "switchboard -o sound". But Switchboard 2 has things like "switchboard -o hardware-gcc-sound" for plugs imported from G-C-C and "switchboard -o system-pantheon-about" for native plugs.

This is very problematic to translate to from just "sound", and furthermore, applications calling Switchboard directly should NEVER be concerned with whether the plug is native to Pantheon or not. But with this system the *app* has to know whether it's a native plug or not and call either -gcc- or -pantheon- depending on that. Do we want to break every single native app when we replace a G-C-C plug with a native plug? Hell no!

Same goes for the "hardware-" and such category prefixes. We've moved plugs between categories before and we will probably continue to do so. Apps are not concerned what category a plugs belongs to, and moving plugs between categories or adding/removing categories should not break any apps.

I've honestly tried looking up all the plugs in BASH which turned out to be waaaay more complicated than it should have been and then translating things like "sound" to these full-blown invocations. This logic really should be built into Switchboard itself, either in Vala, or as a script wrapper. I could even write that wrapper if implementing that in Vala proves overly tedious, but I'll need info about where o where the plug names are stored and how to list them without terrible haxxx.