No, I don't think doctest should be made robust against RuntimeErrors.  doctest's purpose is to check for bugs, and IMO this is a bug in flask.  In particular, it is not doctest that flask is not cooperating with, it is hasattr.  It used to be that hasattr would mask errors raised, and this caused a number of both debugging and production problems, to the point where hasattr was not considered safe to use.  But it eventually got fixed: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/python/dev/856859