RE: C-h C-b to view "Reporting Bugs" section of the manual

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Drew Adams writes:

 > >  > `C-h M-k' for `describe-keymap'
 > > 
 > > Speaking of redundant bindings (C-h m ...)
 > 
 > Not at all.  Have you tried it?  There is nothing similar anywhere, AFAIK.  It
 > is not like `C-x b' (current bindings, all maps) or `C-h m' (mode description -
 > variable and always incomplete wrt a keymap).  Try finding the keys bound in a
 > minibuffer keymap, in a human-readable form.

*shrug*  For me, it's a YAGNI; I've never wanted that, so M-x
describe-keymap would be good enough in case I ever want it in the
future.

Maybe other people would like it to be on key though, and I grant that
bindable keys are now a scarce resource.

 > When you look for the doc about a command (including `r-e-b'), why
 > not have immediately a set of links to its doc in the manuals (with
 > the manual names and nodes in the links).

Well, my answer is "that's ugly and harder to invoke (gotta goose the
rat) than C-h C-f RET which already works" (at least in XEmacs, C-h f
foo RET gives you the docstring for foo and leaves point on `foo' so
that C-h C-f defaults to the right thing).  IMO YMMV FWIW etc.

Furthermore, here the purpose of putting the Bugs node on a key is to
make it immediately available to bug reporters.  This isn't about
documenting the use of r-e-b, it's about good style in bug reports.
So it would need to be special-cased somehow (I guess you could have a
generic function that would apropos the obarray and/or the known Info
nodes, but that might be expensive since it would probably have to hit
the disk a lot, possibly including decompressing compressed Info
files).

The proposal to special-case it as a help key is going in the right
direction by making it very inexpensive to get to the Bugs node, but I
question its usefulness because of discoverability concerns.