Emit reStructuredText from sphinx autodoc?

Question

CPython doesn't use autodoc for its documentation - we use hand-written prose.

For PEP 3144 (the ipaddress module), I'd like to use sphinx-apidoc to generate the initial reference documentation. That means I want to run a two-pass operation:

1. Use sphinx-apidoc to emit a Sphinx project for the module that depends on autodoc

2. Run a sphinx builder that creates new reStructuredText source files, with all the autodoc directives replaced by inline reStructuredText content and markup that produces the same output

The first step is straightforward, but I have no idea how to do the second step and can't even think of good ways to search for any existing projects along these lines.

Answer 1

I had same problem and for one time generating of docs I've used quite ugly solution to patch Sphinx, see Make Sphinx generate RST class documentation from pydoc.