Re: Helpful in Emacs?

[Juri Linkov]

> 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.

Refactoring it as a library is very much needed.  Ideally, it should return
information in a structured way, for example:

  ((type . function)
   (name . "car")
   (source-file . "src/data.c")
   (Info-node . "(elisp) List Elements")
   (docstring . ...)
   ...)

This will allow to use the extracted information in different front-ends
such as a html front-end to display Help in eww, etc.  I once attempted
to represent such information as a generated Info node, but abandoned
due to too many small details that are too ambiguous to handle.

If it's possible to refactor helpful.el and separate a library from front-end,
it would be very helpful and will solve such bugs as bug#49587 that currently
displays the Help buffer twice: for the function and the variable part
separately when a symbol for 'C-h o' is both a function and a variable.