Expected Behavior

A global variable not included in __all__ but whitelisted in __pdoc__ is included in the documentation.

Actual Behavior

It is not.

Steps to Reproduce

1. See the following minimal example (and save it as example.py ;)).
2. Generate the documentation, e.g. python3 -m pdoc example.py --html -f .

__all__ = []

variable = 1
"""Documentation"""

__pdoc__ = {}
__pdoc__['variable'] = True

Additional info

• pdoc version: 0.8.3
• I can probably replace "global variable" with "anything"

Kind of working patch

diff --git a/pdoc/__init__.py b/pdoc/__init__.py
index 82f36de..37f9c1d 100644
--- a/pdoc/__init__.py
+++ b/pdoc/__init__.py
@@ -598,6 +598,10 @@ class Module(Doc):
 
         var_docstrings, _ = _pep224_docstrings(self)
 
+        def is_from_this_module(obj):
+            mod = inspect.getmodule(inspect.unwrap(obj))
+            return mod is None or mod.__name__ == self.obj.__name__
+
         # Populate self.doc with this module's public members
         if hasattr(self.obj, '__all__'):
             public_objs = []
@@ -607,11 +611,11 @@ class Module(Doc):
                 except AttributeError:
                     warn("Module {!r} doesn't contain identifier `{}` "
                          "exported in `__all__`".format(self.module, name))
+            public_objs += [(name, inspect.unwrap(obj))
+                           for name, obj in inspect.getmembers(self.obj)
+                           if ((_is_whitelisted(name, self)) and
+                               (is_from_this_module(obj) or name in var_docstrings))]
         else:
-            def is_from_this_module(obj):
-                mod = inspect.getmodule(inspect.unwrap(obj))
-                return mod is None or mod.__name__ == self.obj.__name__
-
             public_objs = [(name, inspect.unwrap(obj))
                            for name, obj in inspect.getmembers(self.obj)
                            if ((_is_public(name) or _is_whitelisted(name, self)) and

(This was just an quick experiment. It throws warnings, I have no idea about the pdoc codebase, therefore no pull request, sorry. I do, however, release this copying of a few lines of code under whatever free license you prefer ;))

That works for my use case, but for example the namedtuple example from the documentation yields
pdoc/__init__.py:244: UserWarning: Couldn't read PEP-224 variable docstrings from <Class 'counterpar.Table'>: could not find class definition warn("Couldn't read PEP-224 variable docstrings from {!r}: {}".format(doc_obj, exc)) (the generated documentation looks okay though).
Again, no idea about pdocs structure, so I did not run any tests or anything like that.

Why I think this should work

From the documentation:

pdoc only extracts public API documentation. If a module defines __all__, then only the identifiers contained in this list are considered public.

Conversely, if __pdoc__[key] = True, then key (and its public members) will be included in the documentation of the module. This can be used to include documentation of private objects[...]