The facilities for doctests from the standard library lack support for scientific computing usecases.

The @astropy project developed a plugin for pytest that helps with floating point comparison, the optional use of remote data, and enables rules for skipping some tests.

See:

• The plugin https://github.com/astropy/pytest-doctestplus
• The discussion in NumPy's DOC issues: DOC: Fix quickstart doc to pass refguide #15703 (comment) DOC: fix remaining doc files for refguide_check #15720 and DOC, TST: check docstrings in doc/*rst files #14970 (comment)

The proposal is to adapt or replace tools/refguide_check.py for the doctests.