Shorten collections.abc.* in signature/docstring

[mglisse]

Hello,
when it generates signature strings, nanobind uses the long form of typing names. For instance, I have an argument typed: collections.abc.Callable[[collections.abc.Sequence[int]], bool], and this string ends up in the documentation as is when I generate it with Sphinx and autodoc.
Personally, I don't like the collections.abc. part. It is long, carries basically 0 information, and makes the whole signature harder to read. When it generates signatures from pure Python code, by default Sphinx's autodoc suppresses the module name from the typehints, and I'd like to get the same behavior between the Python and C++/nanobind parts of my package. Now the question is how to achieve that.

1. Hack: insert the following before the other nanobind includes, not sure if that can have bad consequences but the code still runs and the documentation looks fine

#include <nanobind/nb_defs.h>
#undef NB_TYPING_ABC
#define NB_TYPING_ABC ""

2. Post-process the doc
3. Use nanobind's stub generator (untested). It seems to have code to strip collections.abc.. However, I haven't seen the advice that to generate the doc, one should first generate stubs, and then feed the stubs to sphinx. This doesn't look like what stubs are for.

Do you have any advice? Is it important for some applications to keep collections.abc. in the signature? Would a new nanobind flag to control this behavior make sense? Should stubs be used for this?

[wjakob]

The collections.abc.-prefixed types are indeed very long. On the flipside, this is the type that must be put here, because it captures the semantics of the operation, so there is relatively little flexibility here.

I agree that it would be nice if Sphinx could just not render the collections.abc part. But I think that this is a question for the Sphinx team, not for nanobind.

Therefore, I have a request: could you raise this with the Sphinx team and report back if there is a way to achieve this?

We could explicitly document Sphinx settings/tweaks that make this tool better-behaved with nanobind-based projects.