Re: Python docstrings and licensing/authorship

[Christophe de Dinechin]

> On 16 Sep 2020, at 17:47, John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> For some of the Python cleanup work I am doing, I am moving preamble comments 
> into docstrings. These docstrings are visible in interactive editors and may 
> be visible when using Sphinx to generate documentation manuals for Python 
> code.
> 
> My instinct is to remove the licensing and authorship information from the 
> preamble and leave the docstring only with information functionally relevant 
> to the module, while leaving licensing and authorship information in a 
> comment (above? below?).
> 
> The end effect would be that using e.g. `help(qapi.parser)` in the 
> interactive Python shell would not show licensing or copyright for the 
> module, but it would still be visible in the source file, as always.
> 
> Is this in bad taste? Do we have strong feelings about authorship and 
> licensing being visible in help output and generated documentation?

What about putting that in a separate pseudo-entity, so that help(copyright) 
would show it?

> 
> --js
> 
>