Import Error if module is not defined in this environment about pdoc

[hammad93]

Would you be able to write a flag that simply ignores all import errors?

[BurntSushi]

pdoc generates documentation by importing the module it is trying to document. This means that it must be a valid Python file that is importable in the current environment.

There are no plans to change this. (It would require parsing the Python AST manually.)

[ryneeverett]

There are no plans to change this. (It would require parsing the Python AST manually.)

Perhaps that would be prohibitively difficult but it seems like the tool would be a lot more robust if you didn't have to worry about import side-effects. For instance any django project would currently have to write a wrapper script to handle DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE.

[BurntSushi]

@ryneeverett No, really, it's a non-starter. I totally agree that what you're describing would be awesome, but it would literally require a ground up rewrite. This means pdoc is not the project for that. It should be a new project.

[BurntSushi]

@ryneeverett It's also probably one or two orders of magnitude harder to do.

[BurntSushi]

@ryneeverett On top of all of that, it's really hard (for me personally) to justify that kind of effort to work around non-idiomatic Python code (which shouldn't have nasty import side effects).

[TheCherry]

Have at the moment the same problem.
Did write a large application, that application use the vbox api.
There is at the moment no way to document my software, course he tell me every time:
Exception ImportError: 'No module named xpcom' in <bound method VirtualBoxManager.__del__ of <vboxapi.VirtualBoxManager object at 0x7fd3266d1b10>> ignored
I see noway to ignore that import and create a documentation, that is required for our customer.
Pydoc have exactly the same problem ...