The runtests.py script has a --doctests command line option with the following description:

--doctests Run doctests in module

However, AFAICT this always raises a ValueError. I tried several invocations: python runtests.py --doctests, python runtests.py --doctests numpy/lib/histograms.py (in an attempt to limit the tests to a single module). No matter what, this seems to call down to _pytesttester.py which simply raises a ValueError saying that doctests are not supported.

I assume this is just a vestigial option that should be removed from runtests.py, but I wanted to check if this was expected to work.