Hi Ross,
That sounds great! I’m still not sure if SciPy will want to add a runtime dependency on numpydoc, since we only have `numpy` at the minute… but this is at least a step in the right direction!
Might it still make sense to split docscrape out into a separate repo after your work is done, or do you see those as two orthogonal efforts?
Cheers, Lucas Hi Lucas,
Indeed I think this is a good idea - SciPy is not the only project that depends (or would like to have depended) on the NumpyDocString and docscrape functionality without pulling in Sphinx (or any other dependency).
One solution is to refactor numpydoc to fix the dependency footprint - i.e. make sphinx a soft dependency. That work is mostly complete in [numpy/numpydoc#651]( https://github.com/numpy/numpydoc/pull/651). There are a few final integration tests (see checkboxes in the top post in the PR) that I'd like to run to build confidence that the solution works for everyone. That should include replacing the vendored code in scipy.
Does this solution work for scipy? On Mon, Apr 20, 2026 at 5:06 AM Lucas Colley via NumPy-Discussion < [email protected]> wrote: Hi all,
A while ago I proposed splitting docscrape out from the numpydoc repo: https://github.com/numpy/numpydoc/issues/619.
Why? SciPy has a copy of the docscrape source which is used to generate some docstrings for the public API. Copying source code like this is never great given that the two copies can fall out of sync. Vendoring the entire numpydoc repo in SciPy, however, or adding numpydoc as a runtime dependency, seem off the table, making the situation worse rather than better.
A better solution seems to be to have docscrape be a standalone project, which SciPy can vendor more easily, and which numpydoc can either depend on or vendor. From a modularity perspective at least this seems ideal — there are use-cases where you want docscrape, but not numpydoc, available at runtime. Joren suggested that I float this idea on the mailing list, given that he just submitted a patch to the copy in SciPy without realising that it was vendored code 😄.
What I don't know is whether this would negatively impact maintenance burden etc.? I assume there will be a bit of upfront cost in restructuring the repos, and a little more if we decide to distribute docscrape as a standalone project, but my hope would be that this wouldn't cause any problems long-term?
An alternative solution would be to extract the docscrape source from the numpydoc repo in a vendoring script in SciPy. While okay, that still leaves us having to track commits by hand instead of using e.g. a git submodule, and isn't robust to upstream changes of directory structure.
Feedback appreciated! Eric Larson responded on the PR asking whether SciPy can introduce a dependency on numpydoc, but that is all so far.
Cheers,
Lucas
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