New submission from Nick Coghlan: While working on issue 19330, I also took a look at whether or not I could fix the @contextmanager decorator to also provide useful help information on the resulting objects. This turned out to be difficult, since calling decorated functions produces instances of contextlib._GeneratorContextManager, and help() insists on showing the docs for that rather than a __doc__ attribute set on the context manager instance itself.
This behaviour appears to be ultimately due to "pydoc.render_doc()", which has a hardcoded list of conditions it checks to decide whether to document the instance directly or to provide the class documentation instead: http://hg.python.org/cpython/file/2b904290b3b9/Lib/pydoc.py#l1544 This first idea that comes to mind is to simply add the additional condition that if "obj.__doc__ != type(obj).__doc__", then help() shouldn't replace the object with it's type. The simple trick that I originally explored was simply setting the __doc__ attribute on the _GeneratorContextManager instance based on the docstring of the decorated function, and I believe that approach might work for property instances, too (rather than needing to hardcode the isinstance check into render_doc()). It may even handle some of the other currently hardcoded conditions in that list. ---------- components: Library (Lib) messages: 201322 nosy: ethan.furman, ncoghlan priority: normal severity: normal status: open title: Simplify per-instance control of help() output type: enhancement versions: Python 3.4 _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue19404> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
