Currently, running pydoc on a module will show you the documentation on all regular methods, and all special methods (starting and ending in double underscores). Private methods (starting with a single underscore) are not included. Some times, it would be nice to include docs for these methods aswell, and a small change to pydoc.visiblename solves the problem. I've included a patch that adds this behaviour as an option (-i for include private names). The implementation isn't as clean as one would hope for (sets a global flag), but was the best I could come up with in the short time I had available. Feel free to make a better implementation. The patch is against python 2.5.
This option would be more useful if it became an optional argument to the help() function. For someone working at the python command line prompt, having to switch to pydoc to see private method documentation may be inconvenient. It is more natural to write >>> help(foo, show_private=True)
