Docs for --without-doc-strings argument to configure should mention that builtins can't have their signatures analyzed

Documentation

In the documentation for ./configure the --without-doc-strings option does not mention that removing docstrings also makes it impossible to use the inspect module to get the signature for builtins.

This seems to be an intentional limitation:

• https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/Lib/test/test_capi/test_misc.py#L164
• https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/main/Lib/inspect.py#L2528-L2534

I opened a ticket about a downstream problem due to this in the Django project and there was some confusion about what this compile-time option does.

Can the documentation be improved to mention this? The current docs discuss the docstrings limitation but unless you know about the internals of CPython it can be unclear why this would also make it impossible to inspect builtins.

I’m happy to file an PR to update the text in the docs to discuss this limitation, though I may not fully understand the scope of the problem or what else should be mentioned there.

Linked PRs

• gh-144746

从 Doc/using/configure.rst 中的 --without-doc-strings 选项开始，然后检查所引用的 Lib/inspect.py 和 Lib/test/test_capi/test_misc.py 部分。更新该选项的文档，以说明其对检查内置函数签名的影响，并使用相关的文档检查或构建来验证文档。