[Python-Dev] question about docstring formatting

[glyph at divmod.com]

On 01:06 pm, jeremy at alum.mit.edu wrote:
>It says that the summary line may be used by automatic indexing tools,
>but is there any evidence that such a tool actually exists?  Or was
>there once upon a time?  If there are no such tools, do we still think
>that it is important that it fits on line line?

For what it's worth, https://launchpad.net/pydoctor appears to do this, 
as you can see from the numerous truncated sentences on 
<http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/8.2.0/api/moduleIndex.html>.

I suspect a more reasonable approach for automatic documentation 
generators would be to try to identify the first complete sentence, 
rather than the first line... but, this is at least an accurate 
description of the status quo for some tools :).