There are a lot of questions here on SO asking how to avoid inheriting the docstring of the parent when building docs with sphinx. I have the opposite problem: I want my class-level docstring to be inherited, but that isn't happening.
I built a toy example to show the problem. The two relevant classes are @dataclasses
# parent.py
from dataclasses import dataclass
@dataclass
class Foo:
""" A numpy conform docstring.
This is the long description
Attributes
----------
a_number : int
Just a boring number
a_string : str
A cool string.
"""
a_number : int
a_string : str
# child.py
from dataclasses import dataclass
from .parent import Foo
@dataclass
class Bar(Foo):
a_second_string : str
On top of the sphinx-quickstart files I modified the index.rst to kick-off generating of my classes and I modified the config to include autodoc, autosummary, and numpydoc (also tried napoleon or None, but neither generates the docstring on the child).
.. index.rst
FooBar
======
.. autosummary::
:toctree: _autosummary
foobar.parent.Foo
foobar.child.Bar
# config.py
# -- Path setup --------------------------------------------------------------
# If extensions (or modules to document with autodoc) are in another directory,
# add these directories to sys.path here. If the directory is relative to the
# documentation root, use os.path.abspath to make it absolute, like shown here.
#
import os
import sys
sys.path.insert(0, os.path.abspath('..'))
# -- Project information -----------------------------------------------------
project = 'FooBar'
copyright = '2021, FirefoxMetzger'
author = 'FirefoxMetzger'
# -- General configuration ---------------------------------------------------
# Add any Sphinx extension module names here, as strings. They can be
# extensions coming with Sphinx (named 'sphinx.ext.*') or your custom
# ones.
extensions = [
'sphinx.ext.autodoc',
'sphinx.ext.autosummary',
# 'numpydoc'
]
# Add any paths that contain templates here, relative to this directory.
templates_path = ['_templates']
# List of patterns, relative to source directory, that match files and
# directories to ignore when looking for source files.
# This pattern also affects html_static_path and html_extra_path.
exclude_patterns = ['_build', 'Thumbs.db', '.DS_Store']
# -- Options for HTML output -------------------------------------------------
# The theme to use for HTML and HTML Help pages. See the documentation for
# a list of builtin themes.
#
html_theme = 'alabaster'
# Add any paths that contain custom static files (such as style sheets) here,
# relative to this directory. They are copied after the builtin static files,
# so a file named "default.css" will overwrite the builtin "default.css".
html_static_path = ['_static']
For reference, I'm on Sphinx 4.1.2.
I could (theoretically) add the line __doc__ = Foo.__doc__ to Bar, which would manually import the docstring; however in my case Foo and Bar are autogenerated (XML bindings). I would have to modify the generation script, which is only partly possible because it is an upstream project that would have to accept a respective PR. It would be much better (and faster) if I could solve this locally.
Any pointers on what's going on or how to move forward are highly appreciated.
