Re: Helpful in Emacs?

[Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>]

Stefan Kangas <stefan@marxist.se> writes:

> 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.

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.

> 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

Yes. That was my thought, I wanted to check is there is interest from emacs devs
and I have CC-ed Willfred because he is the only one that can answer the
paper-status I guess, and if there is interest from his and other helpful-devs
side to get this included.

> 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'll help with what I can of course, but I am probably not of much help here. I
have never contributed to Elpa myself :).

By the way, there are probably no problems of getting Helpful into "Nelpa"
(non-gnu elpa), and it already is in Melpa, so the access for new users is not
far away. I would though really like to see it as a complement to built-in help
out of the box.