help= does not set trait docstring

[astrofrog]

At the moment, it looks like the help= text doesn't set the __doc__ attribute of traits, which produces this kind of output when using sphinx's autosummary:

Would it be possible to use the help text to also set __doc__ on traits or is there a good reason why this isn't done?

[minrk]

It isn't usual to set __doc__ on instances of types, is it?

[astrofrog]

@minrk - is there any reason not to though? Documentation pages like the one above would look a lot clearer.

[minrk]

What's generating that page? Is there any precedent for setting __doc__ on instances? I'm not necessarily opposed, I'd just like to not be the first to change the meaning of a a pretty fundamental Python attribute.

[astrofrog]

The page was generated by sphinx-automodapi but I think ultimately that uses autoattribute from Sphinx's autodoc.

[pwm1234]

I second this request. I am running into exactly the same problem. I have put in help strings for each of my traits but they do not show up in the documentation. How do I document the traits that are used by a class? I would prefer to not replicate the help string, but documenting a class's traits even with duplicating the help string would be much better than getting a table like above.

I just came across the autoattribute attribute documentation. I discovered that I can add the documentation that I want by adding a triple-quoted docstring on the line below the Trait definition.

[dopplershift]

The triple quoted string works with the exception that when traits are inherited from parent classes, the subclass documentation shows the original trait documentation.