Hello,
I've merged the revision of describe into the main branch of CVS.
So if you update from CVS you'll get it, and it will be in the next release
(barring unforeseen problems).
It works OK to the best of my knowledge with sbcl, clisp, and gcl
(all on Linux). Vadim tells me it also works w/ gcl + Windows.
sbcl and clisp are utf-8 aware and the new describe system works
correctly in a utf-8 locale (es_ES.UTF-8 or pt_BR.UTF-8).
(Hmm, gcl + utf-8 seems to display the help text correctly even
though gcl doesn't seem to handle the non-ascii characters.)
In non-utf-8 locale, new describe works with sbcl, clisp, and gcl.
The one wart that I'm aware of is that the autoload mechanism
prints a warning message the first time some documentation is
accessed. (That's because the autoloader loads the precomputed
index, which is a Lisp file.) Maybe someone knows how to quiet
the message, or there's a different way to ensure the index is loaded.
Special thanks to Vadim for his generous help.
best
Robert