Recently I helped out on issue16954 which involved filling in docstrings 

for methods and classes in ElementTree.py

While doing so, I tried to test my work in the interpreter like this...

    >>> from xml.etree.ElementTree import Element

    >>> help(Element)

...but found that help() showed nothing but empty strings!

After some debugging, I found that the culprit was the

 `from _elementtree import *` near the bottom of the module.

Not wanting to copy & paste docstrings around,  I thought one solution 

might be to just reassign Element.__doc__ with the right docstring. 

But, it seems that you can't do that for C extensions:

    >>> from _elementtree import Element as cElement

    >>> cElement.__doc__ = 'correct docstring'

    Traceback (most recent call last):

      File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>

    TypeError: can't set attributes of built-in/extension type 'xml.etree.ElementTree.Element'

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Q.  Is there way to maintain the same docstring without 

    resorting to copying and pasting it in two places?

I tried to find an example in the source which addressed this, but

found that the docstrings in similar cases to be largely duplicated. 

For instance, _datetimemodule.c, decimal_.c and _json.c all seem to

exhibit this docstring copy and pastage.