RE: Can't add bookmarks for help pages

[Kelly Dean <kellydeanch@yahoo.com>]

--- On Sat, 6/9/12, Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:
> What do you mean by a help page?  Do you mean the
> output, in buffer *Help*, from
> a help command/key such as `C-h f' or `C-h v'?
Yes.

> But it's easy enough to do.  You just need to define
> your own new bookmark type
> for it.  To do that you need to define two functions:
[snip]
Thanks, but the first time I tried it (this is also the first time I tried Bookmark Plus), I got the message "bmkp-bookmark-name-member: Args out of range: 0, 0", and all of my bookmarks disappeared in the *Bookmark List* buffer. I killed and restarted Emacs, and when I pressed C-x r l, I got the same message again, and it doesn't list any bookmarks. I didn't lose any data which matters; I'm still just evaluating Emacs, not using it yet.

While trying to reproduce the problem, I deleted the Bookmark Plus elc files which I'd generated, and deleted my-make-help-record and my-jump-help-bookmark from my init file, so the problem must be just with Bookmark Plus, or Emacs, or how I'm using them.
Using Emacs 24.1:
rm ~/.emacs.d/bookmarks
emacs -Q
C-x C-f foo ret
C-x r m ret
C-x C-c
emacs #Using init file with just (setq load-path (cons "~/.emacs.d/lib" load-path)) (require 'bookmark+)
C-x r l
I get "bmkp-bookmark-name-member: Args out of range: 0, 0". I have the eight files from https://github.com/emacsmirror/bookmark-plus (dated May 16, 2012), and no elc files.

Another try:
rm ~/.emacs.d/bookmarks
emacs #Using the same init file
C-x C-f foo ret
C-x r m ret
I get "bmkp-autonamed-bookmark-p: Wrong type argument: stringp, nil"
C-x r m foo ret
C-x r l
I get "let: Args out of range: 0, 0"
C-x C-c
Emacs writes (custom-set-variables '(bmkp-last-as-first-bookmark-file "~/.emacs.d/bookmarks")) to my init file without asking me first.

> But why would you want such a bookmark type (assuming this
> was what you had in
> mind)?  Why not just use the help commands?  Why
> would you want a bookmark for a
> specific bit of help text (e.g. for a specific variable),
> rather than just use a
> general command that works for any argument (e.g. any
> variable name)?
I want to bookmark help pages in Emacs for the same reason that I bookmark web pages in my browser and bookmark man and info pages in Emacs: to put them on my reading list.
Another reason is that I'm trying to be able to save all of my state (see my other post on this list, "Saving all state, not just some of it"), and had the idea that even though Emacs doesn't save my open help pages, I can at least bookmark them to remind me what to re-open after I restart Emacs.

BTW, I happened to skim through bookmark+-mac.el and noticed this:
;;      In particular, ALWAYS LOAD `bookmark+-mac.el' (not
;;      `bookmark+-mac.elc') BEFORE YOU BYTE-COMPILE new versions of
;;      the files, in case there have been any changes to Lisp macros
;;      (in `bookmark+-mac.el').
;;
;;      (This is standard procedure for Lisp: code that depends on
;;      macros needs to be byte-compiled anew after loading the
;;      updated macros.)
If I byte-compile Bookmark Plus, then in a few months when I update, I'm going to forget your warning, and I'm going to suffer whatever consequences result. Maybe the new packaging system in Emacs 24 helps with such dependency issues?