Bad design in trigger.module hook_help

From a bug report to bot.module:

hook_help implementations sometimes return an empty string when there is no help - e.g. pathauto_help(), actions_help(), but these get added to the array when hook_help is invoked via module_invoke_all() as in bot.module, resulting in "empty" features being listed, e.g. (22:09:11) Druplicon_tmp: Detailed information is available by asking for "help " where is one of: , Botagotchi, Drupal URLs, Factoids, Function Lookups, Seen. (note the comma at the start of the feature list)

My reply:

This is actually a bug in those modules, not in bot.module. Both actions.module and pathauto.module always preinit $output to '' (as opposed to NULL) and always return $output, regardless if the module help properly fires. This is not something that any of the core modules do, and is bad design. Akismet.module does it also. Whilst I agree that your fix would get rid of these errors, I don't find them MY errors to get rid of - they should be fixed in the source module (and I heartily will support you creating issues in their queues that refer to this explanation).

This particular actions.module bug made its way into Drupal 6's triggers.module.