[issue13691] pydoc help (or help('help')) claims to run a help utility; does nothing

[Devin Jeanpierre]

New submission from Devin Jeanpierre <jeanpierreda at gmail.com>:

What follows is a copy-paste of a shell session. Notice that at the end, rather than being inside the online help utility, I'm still in the interactive interpreter. I was able to duplicate this on python3.2, python2.7, and python2.6 (verifying it on other versions would have required installing them). Reading the source in trunk, there is nothing that looks like it actually should run this interactive help session. It's just missing.

I guess nobody used this, eh? I've attached a patch that should fix it. I'm not sure how you want to handle adding a test for this, so please advise me on that.

-----

>>> help('help')

Welcome to Python 3.2!  This is the online help utility.

If this is your first time using Python, you should definitely check out
the tutorial on the Internet at http://docs.python.org/tutorial/.

Enter the name of any module, keyword, or topic to get help on writing
Python programs and using Python modules.  To quit this help utility and
return to the interpreter, just type "quit".

To get a list of available modules, keywords, or topics, type "modules",
"keywords", or "topics".  Each module also comes with a one-line summary
of what it does; to list the modules whose summaries contain a given word
such as "spam", type "modules spam".

>>>

----------
components: Library (Lib)
files: r74214.diff
keywords: patch
messages: 150427
nosy: Devin Jeanpierre
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: pydoc help (or help('help')) claims to run a help utility; does nothing
versions: Python 2.6, Python 2.7, Python 3.2
Added file: http://bugs.python.org/file24121/r74214.diff

_______________________________________
Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue13691>
_______________________________________