Re: Helpful in Emacs?

[Arthur Miller]

Eduardo Ochs <eduardoochs@gmail.com> writes:

> On Thu, 9 Sept 2021 at 12:22, Daniel Martín <mardani29@yahoo.es> wrote:
>>
>> Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com> writes:
>>
>> > A week or two ago I was actually looking at Emacs help code. I wanted to 
>> > bring
>> > in the source code as well as references into help lookup, but honestly, I 
>> > would
>> > rather prefer to just include helpful instead of re-implementing 
>> > everything. If
>> > the authors have signed the paperwork, I see no reason why not just include
>> > it. Also original help lookup could be left as low-resource, faster 
>> > solution for
>> > people who prefer to spend less resources on help lookup, while helpful 
>> > could be
>> > enabled by a custom variable, something like show extended help or as
>> > a minor mode.
>>
>> Instead of integrating the library as a whole, I'd prefer we extract
>> those features from Helpful that people think are useful and not already
>> available in Emacs.  I don't think that having two separate help systems
>> in core is a good idea, there'll be too much duplication and maintenance
>> burden.
>>
>> Showing references to a symbol is an interesting feature (for example,
>> to learn how to use an ELisp API by looking at examples).  I see that
>> Helpful provides this feature via the separate package elisp-refs
>> (https://github.com/Wilfred/elisp-refs).  The closest package I know
>> that actually understands ELisp is el-search from ELPA, but elisp-refs
>> is a more specific package for the concrete use case of searching for
>> references.
>>
>> If we can get copyright papers, perhaps we could start by integrating
>> the functionality of elisp-refs as an xref backend.  Then the help
>> system could use the new backend to provide a "References" link button.
>
>
> Another vote for "extracting features"/"refactoring helpful" here...
>
> I tried to add support for helpful to eev about a year ago and I got
> lost and stuck - I only had a few hours to play with it, and I was not
> super focused, but was quite frustrated at the end. I was hoping that
> helpful would be structured as a library plus a front-end, and it was
> not.

Of course, it is not a library, it is an application :). That is why I say it is
probably as much work to extract stuff out of it as to rebuild it. Even faster
is just to include it as is and offer a defcustom to switch between old built-in
help and helpful. And once again, if you don't get helpful authors permission,
you can not just "extract", you will have to rebuild it from scratch. It might
not be so difficult to do it, but I would prefer to do some more fun stuff than
to implement funcitonality that already exists if we can just include it. Just
my 2 cents as they say.