> I don't think we have to worry about it getting out of date quickly.  

Fair point :)

> Automatically generating the IDLE help at run time from a documentation 
> source file is not posssible anyway, since the doc sources are not 
> available in a standard location for installed Pythons.

This isn't quite what I meant either; I had intended it to be done at either Python build or install time.  Your method is much simpler, though, I like it.

That said, here's the diff between the (now) current Lib/idlelib/help.txt and the Sphinx ``make text`` output of Doc/library/idle.rst.  I've not found where we've automated the pydoc topics generation, else I'd try to provide a patch to do this as well.