Emacs and changing documentation formats

To tie this back to the grandparent commenter asking "are indices really that useful?": For a language like Python the IDE can offer some degree of contextual help based on introspecting the standard library. For Bash, Make, C++, and many others, this isn't possible so you need indexed documentation.

Furthermore, indexed documentation gives you things that introspection doesn't -- I often find myself looking up the documentation for Python keywords, standard exception hierarchy, etc etc etc. None of which I can get from ipython's contextual help, at least.

I use Emacs, of course. Its context help for makefiles and bash... well, if they were usefully parsable, it would use their Info manuals (since of course they have Info manuals). They're not, so I have to open the manuals myself and hit 'i' to look in the index. The horror!