https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72424
--- Comment #7 from John Mark Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com --- An old version of the patch contains a way to detect epydoc https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/169788/6/pywikibot/tools.py,cm
However that is an quite expensive task to run during startup.
If we can get Sphinx doc builds to work easily, I think we can live with epydoc being difficult to run.