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tldr-pages client specification

  • Current Specification Version: 1.1

This document contains the official specification for tldr-pages clients. It is not a specification of the format of the pages themselves - only a specification of how a user should be able to interface with an official client.

The keywords "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.

Changelog

  • v1.0 (23rd January 2019)
    • Initial release

Terminology

In order to aid the understanding of this specification document, a number of terms will be defined in this section.

Page

tldr-pages consists of multiple pages - each of which describes a specific command.

Platform

Pages are grouped by platform. A platform is an operating system. For example, windows, linux, osx. The special platform common contains pages for commands that work identically across more than 1 platform.

If a page is common across multiple platforms, but slightly differently on a given platform, then the page is still stored in common, but a copy tailored for the differing platform is placed in that platform's specific folder.

For example, if the command foo is common to mac, windows, and linux but functions differently on windows, then the main page will be stored in common, and a copy will be placed in windows that's altered to match the different functionality.

Command-Line Interface

This section describes the standardised command-line interface (CLI) for clients implementing one. Clients that do not provide a CLI can ignore this section.

Arguments

A number of arguments MUST be supported (unless otherwise specified) if a CLI is implemented:

Argument Required? Meaning
-v, --version Yes Shows the current version of the client, and the version of this specification that it implements.
-p, --platform Yes Specifies the platform to be used to perform the action (either listing or searching). If this option is specified, the selected platform MUST be checked first instead of the current platform as described below.
-u, --update Conditional Updates the offline cache of pages. MUST be implemented if cache is supported.
-l, --list No Lists all the pages in the current platform to the standard output. If the special platform all is specified a list of all pages in all platforms MUST be displayed.

Clients MAY NOT implement the long form of an argument (--update, --version, --list, --platform).

Additional decoration MAY be printed if the standard output is a TTY. If not, then the output MUST not contain any additional decorations. For example a page list MUST be formatted with 1 page name per line (to enable easy manipulation using standard CLI tools such as grep etc.).

Clients MAY support additional custom arguments and syntax not documented here.

Here are some examples invocations using the above flags:

tldr --update
tldr --version
tldr -l

Page Names

The first argument that does not start with a dash (-) MUST be considered the page name.

In addition, page names MAY contain spaces (e.g. git status) - such page names MUST be transparently concatenated with dashes (-). For example, the page name:

git checkout

...becomes this:

git-checkout

Here are some example invocations:

tldr 7za
tldr eyeD3
tldr git checkout
tldr --platform osx bash

Directory Structure

This section documents the directory structure that contains the pages themselves.

The master version of every page is stored inside (but not directly) the pages directory. Inside this directory, there is a folder for each platform - for example windows, linux, and the special common platform:

  • pages/
    • common/
    • linux/
    • windows/
    • osx/
    • .....etc.

Additional platforms MAY be added in the future. Clients MAY NOT support new platforms (though such support is RECOMMENDED), but MUST NOT break if additional platforms are added.

The pages themselves sit inside the appropriate platform folder, with the extension .md. Here are some example mappings:

Command name Mapped name Filename
7za 7za 7za.md
git checkout git-checkout git-checkout.md
tar tar tar.md

Translations

Other directories sit alongside the main pages directory, and contain translations of the master versions of every page - though pages MAY NOT have a translation available for a given language yet. Furthermore, a given language MAY NOT have a folder yet either. The format of these directories is pages.{language-tag}, where {language-tag} is a BCP 47 conforming tag in the form of <language>-<region>, where:

  • <language> is the shortest ISO 639 language code for the chosen language (see here for a complete list).
  • <region> is the two-letter ISO 3166-1 region code for the chosen region (see here for a complete list).

Some examples:

  • Chinese (Taiwan): pages.zh-TW.
  • Portuguese (Brazil): pages.pt-BR.
  • German (Germany): pages.de-DE.

You can check the validity of BCP 47 tags here.

The structure inside these translation folders is identical to that of the main pages folder.

Page Structure

Although this specification is about the interface that clients must provide, it is also worth noting that pages are written in standard CommonMark, which the exception of the non-standard {{ and }} syntax, which surrounds values in an example that users may edit. Clients MUST NOT break if the page format is changed within the CommonMark specification.

Page Resolution

This section defines the algorithm by which a client can decide which page a user has requested.

After transparently replacing spaces ( ) with dashes (-), clients have several decisions to make:

  • The language of a page to display to a client
  • The platform to display a page from

Platform

Clients MUST default to displaying tldr-page from the platform upon which the client is running. For example, a client running on Windows 10 will default to displaying pages from the windows platform. Clients MAY provide a user-configurable option to override this behaviour, however.

If a page is not available for the host platform, clients MUST fallback to the special common platform.

If a page is not available for either the host platform or the common platform, then clients SHOULD search other platforms and display a page from there - along with a warning message.

For example, a user has a client on windows, and requests the apt page. The client consults the platforms in the following order:

  1. windows - Not available
  2. common - Not available
  3. osx - Not available
  4. linux - Page found

Steps #3 and #4 may be done in either order.

It is possible that due to this page resolution logic, the client may show a page which does not belong to the host platform because a page can reside in common, and not be present on the host platform. Clients must not assume that a given command is always executable on the host platform.

If a page isn't found

If a page cannot be found in any platform, then it is RECOMMENDED that clients display an error message with a link to create a new issue against the tldr-pages/tldr GitHub repository. Said link might take the following form:

https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr/issues/new?title=page%20request:%20{command_name}

....where {command_name} is the name of the command that was not found.

If multiple versions of a page were found

If multiple versions of a page were found for different platforms, then a client MAY choose to display a notice to the user notifying them of this.

Language

Pages can be written in multiple languages. If a client has access to environment variables, several standard ones exist to specify the language in which a client should operate. If not, then clients MUST make reasonable assumptions based on the information provided by the environment in which they operate (e.g. consulting navigator.languages in a browser, etc.).

The LANG environment variable MUST be used to determine both the language of a page to display, and the display language of any interface text shown to the user (e.g. things like Cache updated successfully, for example).

Additionally, the LC_MESSAGES environment variable MAY be present. If specified, clients MUST use it's value to determine the language in which interface text is shown in (separately from the language to display the page in).

Finally, the LANGUAGE environment variable specifies a priority list of languages that a user wishes to read in. If present, a client MUST use the defined priority list to decide on the language that to display in.

If a page is not available in the user's preferred language, then a client MUST respect the user's priority list defined in the LANGUAGE variable (if specified), and MAY choose to notify the user that a page in their chosen language couldn't be found (perhaps along with a link to the translations section of the contributing guide).

Other Considerations

This section contains a number of other items that don't neatly fit into any of the sections defined above.

If appropriate, it is RECOMMENDED that clients implement a cache of pages. If implemented, clients MUST download the entire archive from https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr.

Additionally, clients MAY automatically update the cache on a regular basis.