This seems like a resonable thing for pydoc to do.  However, I took a
quick look, and pydoc has no notion of error status. Adding one would
require a non-trival refactoring of the code (at least to do it
right...a hackish version might not be too difficult).  

So, I doubt this is going to happen unless you can contribute a patch.

On the other hand, your test suite should be catching any errors pydoc
would catch, so I can't say I really understand your stated reason for
the request.  Unless you are building documentation for packages you
don't maintain?