It seems that this issue is still properly open. (Another open issue seems be related: http://bugs.python.org/issue30129)

In the docs on partial, we have:

>>> from functools import partial
>>> basetwo = partial(int, base=2)
>>> basetwo.__doc__ = 'convert base 2 string to int'

But the help function doesn't find that __doc__:

>>> help(basetwo)
class partial(builtins.object)
 |  partial(func, *args, **keywords) - new function with partial application
...

Perhaps this could be solved by having PyDoc check for isinstance of a Callable or making partial an instance of a Function?

>>> type(basetwo)
<class 'functools.partial'>
>>> basetwo.__dict__
{'__doc__': 'convert base 2 string to int'}
>>> type(basetwo)
<class 'functools.partial'>
>>> isinstance(basetwo, partial)
True
>>> from types import FunctionType; from collections import Callable
>>> isinstance(basetwo, FunctionType)
False
>>> isinstance(basetwo, Callable)
True

The partial repr seems to get us close:

>>> repr(basetwo)
"functools.partial(<class 'int'>, base=2)"

I haven't dug much further into this, but I'm interested in doing the work to finish it, and I don't think the patch submitted 6 years ago quite gets us there. Any other thoughts before I decide to give it a go?