help(module) only provides help on classes and functions 
that were first defined within the module.  For wrapper 
modules (like re), or partially-in-C modules (like socket)
this is not helpful.

The following patch changes pydoc(module) to document 
exactly the names listed in __all__, with a fallback to the 
current choices if __all__ is not defined.

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Replacing with an improved version.  This is a diff to CVS 
head; users of Python 2.3 would have to either change the 
line numbers or also replace collections.deque.  (Setting deque 
to list was enough to allow testing.)

[Original patch had a problem with normal modules, but the 
exception was caught at a higher level, and *something* 
returned, so I didn't notice it at first.]

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Right now all four hunks of the patch are failing for me
(probably because of #969938, which fixes part of the
problem). Could you update the patch to CVS HEAD and assign
to me afterwards? I'll take a good look at it then.

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Yes, the earlier patch fixes most of this, and cleans up the 
remainder.  The only thing left is to make sure visiblename 
gets called on even imported objects.

Style question:  Should I use "if all" or "if all is not None".  

The only time it would make a difference is with an 
unusual imported special name.  (__*__, but not 
__builtins__, __doc__, __file__, __path__, __module__, 
or __name__).

Given that all has been bound to object.__all__ (or to 
None, in case of AttributeError), should I

(1)  Use "if all is not None or ..." to emphasize that I'm 
avoiding a special case (__all__ not defined) or
(2)  Use "if all or ..." because it is shorter

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'if all is not None': explicit is better than implicit. I
checked this in as rev 1.98 of pydoc.py. Thanks for the patch!

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Thank you for applying it!