Subject: bug#55376: Inconsistent behavior in apropos-user-options

From: Liang-Jie Lee <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 May 2022 02:38:40 +0800

According to the manual, apropos-user-option can search not only user
options but variables when adding C-u prefix.
> With C-u prefix, or if ‘apropos-do-all’ is non-nil, also show variables,
not just user options.

>From the documentation, I think using C-u should have the same effect as
setting apropos-do-all to t. But my experiment got 2 different results.

1. set apropos-do-all to t
(let ((apropos-do-all t))
  (call-interactively #'apropos-user-option))

Insert "emacs", and I got the result shown in figure 1. In the Apropos
buffer, each variable has a hyperlink to the corresponding *help* buffer.

2. C-u M-x apropos-user-option, and insert "emacs"
The result is shown in figure 2. As you can see, those entries have no
hyperlinks to the documentation.

I think the behavior is not consistent compared to other apropos commands.
For example, no matter using method 1 or 2 to invoke apropos-commands (C-h
a), we would get 2 same buffers both with hyperlinks to click off.

Regards,
Liang-Jie Lee