Documentation
The major documentation technical barriers to be overcome in the Kepler project are:
-- For the distribution, a consolidated web site section of all documentation for all modules in (X)HTML format, hopefully laced together by an index page.
-- Making that section separately searchable (can't rely on web search engines for pages that will be continuously updated).
-- Replicating that section as a module for LuaDist so that users can review documentation before installing modules. Query, whether the search capability can be incorporated in this module? Framed HTML formats such as WebBook are problematic for search indexing purposes because framed pages have no URLs.
-- Setting some minimum documentation requirements for modules, introduced gradually and hopefully followed by others as advantages become apparent.
See related page on the wiki at http://lua-users.org/wiki/DocumentingLuaCode, particularly its Integrating Module Documentation for Distributions section with insightful thoughts by David M. and Hisham.
LuaStyleGuide - has a few notes on commenting.
Known existing code documentation tools are listed below (there are likely more).
DecoratorsAndDocstrings
Annotate module Annotations and Docstrings for Lua Values.
DecoratorsAndDocstrings has methods for associating documentation with objects at runtime.
AskLua
AskLua implements a help system for on line use in the interactive interpreter, and for generating documentation in html and printed formats. For a module, it shows several kinds of help: basic, usage, functions list, example, and others. Lua 5.1 only.
ExpLua
ExpLua is both a code comment format and a tool for extracting said comments and exporting HTML, LaTeX, and whatnot. It is freely available for use under the same License as the Lua project, with the usual disclaimers.
LDoc
https://github.com/stevedonovan/LDoc
Successor to LuaDoc. Compatible with both Lua 5.1 and 5.2.
lk.doc
Lubyk documentation parser.
LuaDoc
http://keplerproject.github.com/luadoc/
Project is no longer maintained. Successor is LDoc, which is mostly compatible with LuaDoc input.
LuaHelp
http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaHelp is a script that goes through the HTML version of the Lua manual and extracts documentation relevant to functions by name (and more besides). Lua 5.1 only.
lua-ihelp
https://github.com/dlaurie/lua-ihelp/blob/master/help.lua
LuaPOD
LuaPOD translates a POD file into HTML using Lua and the LPeg library.
WebBook
http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/webbook/
WebBook will likely be the most troublesome documentation format to deal with when consolidating documentation. It uses HTML frames, which pose issues for indexing and searching documentation.