inspect.getdoc has these lines:

     if not isinstance(doc, types.StringTypes):
         return None

which interfere with the case where __doc__ is some
other thing that has a good __str__. I wanted to make a
lazy __doc__ that did an expensive lookup of some
external documentation only when it was str()'d, but
since doc displayers often (correctly) use
inspect.getdoc, they were getting None.

I think the intention of the test in getdoc() is to
avoid trying string operations on a __doc__ that is
None. I think that a more lenient version would allow
me to do my fancy docstrings but still solve the
'__doc__ is None' problem. Please consider the
following patch:

if doc is None:
     return None
doc = str(doc)

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It's not a good idea to use properties for __doc__:

"""
>>> class Foo(object):
...    def _get(self):
...        return 'the docstring'
...    __doc__ = property(_get)
...
>>> print Foo().__doc__
the docstring
>>> print Foo.__doc__
<property object at 0xb7b3a234>
>>>
"""

In this light, I don't view inspect.getdoc's lack of support
for __doc__-as-property as a bug.

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I don't know. Neal, do you have an opinion about property
docstrings?

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That code doesn't work if doc is unicode.  I'm not sure how
to achieve what you want.

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Closing as Won't Fix.