Coding style: docstring inconsistency with pep8 and pep257

[anonymous]

PEP257 advises a docstring as "It prescribes the function or method's effect as a command ("Do this", "Return that"), not as a description; e.g. don't write "Returns the pathname ..."."

PEP8 also mentions PEP257 and gives example """Return a foobang [...]

But Django Coding Style advises to use exactly the opposite in ​http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/contributing/#coding-style .
If this is unadvertedly, we should go for the PEP257 convention; if this is by intent, someone who knows it should add the reason for not following the PEP247 convention.

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

The reason we do it the current way is for consistency with all the other code in Django (and because it reads quite nicely). It's documented in contributing.txt that we prefer active versions of docstrings ("Returns...") rather than passive versions ("Return..."). There's nothing that really needs to be added here.