[Doc-SIG] Automated __doc__ string processing systems

[Edward D. Loper]

I've recently been reading up on the status of automated documentation
extraction from formatted inline comments in Python.  It sounds like
one day, a tool for extraction may become part of the standard library..
(PEP 224).  I'm trying to find out more about what the current status
of this is, who is actively working on such tools, and how I can 
help.  I'm pretty new to the area, but as far as I can tell there are
3 such tools currently in active development:
  * Happydoc
  * Pydoc
  * Docutils

Are all of these actually being actively developed?  Is one more likely
than the others to become the standard?  I'd like to help work on this
project, but I'm not sure who I should be contacting, and I'm pretty
new to the area.

Also, I wrote a short essay trying to list many of the issues that
such doc tools must deal with in one place, and discuss those issues.
I'd appreciate it if you could give me any feedback on it.  It's
available at:
    http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~edloper/pythondoc.html

Thanks!

-Edward