[Myrmornis]

OK, maybe I will open an issue. The obvious concern is how to avoid duplicating the text among the various HTTP verb functions. In theory python allows the docstring to be manipulated via __doc__. However I don't think there is a precedent for using that mechanism to avoid duplication of docstring content that is considered good style, but perhaps someone could correct me if that is wrong.

[merlincorey]

You'd probably want to make a metaclass that handled the manipulation of __doc__ for shared verbs if you didn't want to duplicate the data too much.

[Myrmornis]

OK, but in requests they are top-level functions, not methods. Is there anything wrong with the below? I don't think I've seen it done.

  __shared_docstring_content = """
  bar
  baz
  """

  def f():
      "f docstring"
      pass

  f.__doc__ += __shared_docstring_content


  def g():
      "g docstring"
      pass

  g.__doc__ += __shared_docstring_content

[andreasvc]

I would do simply """f docstring\n%s""" % _shared_docstring, no need for a separate concatenation. However, I wonder whether sphinx would handle this.

[shoyer]

This sort of thing works fine. We use it for pandas all the time.

[aaronchall]

Pandas does this, and I think it works well, even if it's not entirely transparent in the source.