[issue15582] Enhance inspect.getdoc to follow inheritance chains

[Nick Coghlan]

New submission from Nick Coghlan:

Currently, if you override a method from a base class, the docstring is not inherited, even if it remains accurate.

This issue proposes an enhancement to inspect.getdoc() that allows the docstring to be retrieved from the inheritance hierarchy in the case where it is not overridden in the subclass by providing an explicit docstring.

Specifically, in the case where obj.__doc__ is None, and either the first parameter is a bound method, or a class object is passed in as the second parameter, inspect.getdoc will search the MRO based on obj.__name__ until it finds an attribute with a non-None __doc__ value.

(In Python 2, this could have been automatic for both bound and unbound methods. Unfortunately, there are no unbound methods in Python 3, so the second parameter is needed to handle the unbound method case)

----------
components: Library (Lib)
messages: 167654
nosy: eric.snow, ncoghlan
priority: normal
severity: normal
stage: needs patch
status: open
title: Enhance inspect.getdoc to follow inheritance chains
type: enhancement
versions: Python 3.4

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue15582>
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