On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 at 8:13 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:

Hi all,

I have a question about how I should manage documentation for the
statistics module for Python 3.4. At the moment, I have extensive
docstrings in the module itself. I don't believe anyone has flagged that
as "too much information" in a code review, so I'm going to assume that
large docstrings will be acceptable.

However, I have been asked to ensure that there is a separate
statistics.rst file for documentation.

I don't want to have to maintain the documentation in two places, both
in the .py module and in .rst file. Can anyone give me some pointers as
to best practice in this situation? Is there a "How To Write Docs For
The Standard Library" document somewhere? Perhaps I missed it, but my
searches found nothing useful. I have read this:

http://docs.python.org/devguide/documenting.html

but it didn't shed any light on my situation.

IMHO the right way to think about it is that the .rst files are by far the more important documentation. Sometimes we forget that most Python programmers are people who won't go into the source to read docstrings. Moreover, the nice web layout, table of contents, index, and link-ability of .rst is very important - I also prefer to read it as opposed to going through docstrings. I only go to docstrings/code when I didn't find something in the .rst docs, at this point also usually opening a bug to fix that.

So whatever you do for statistics, full .rst docs must be there. It's the docstrings that are "optional" here. The best solution may be auto generating, for sure. But a module without .rst documented is unacceptable.

Eli