Re: Helpful in Emacs?

[Stefan Kangas]

Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:

> Any chance of getting Helpful, https://github.com/Wilfred/helpful, into 
> official
> Emacs? In the contributor list I see some familiar names which already
> contributed to Emas, so they have signed FSF papers, but also some unkown ones
> too.

FWIW, here's my take on this:

1. helpful.el has several useful features.  They should be evaluated
one by one with the aim to integrate them in a clean way into the
built-in help.el et al libraries.  Such an evaluation would likely
show that some features are well suited for the default help system.
Maybe others we would want as optional features.  Maybe other features
still are better left in an external package.

2. Doing the above job well would presumably leave little reason to
distribute helpful.el together with Emacs.

3. Before we can even start thinking of doing any of this, we will
need to sort the copyright assignments.  This to my mind means that
the next step to make meaningful progress here is to get the module
onto GNU ELPA.  Once that is done, points 1 and 2 are mostly "only" a
matter of copying in the code.

If you would like to work together with the helpful.el maintainers to
get the package onto GNU ELPA, that would be worthwhile and
appreciated, I think.

> I remember that some time ago both helpful and whichkey were discussed on this
> list, but I have no idea what was conclusion if there was any.

AFAIR, there was no conclusion, really.