tldr-pages/tldr

decision/docs: keep or change the approach for #8786 and #7596 and document this

vitorhcl opened this issue · 0 comments

We decided on #7596 the following approach:

The adopted solution is to align page names to Debian's binary names, due to the fact that Debian is the most popular base distro. Then,

if the binary is shipped under an alias on another non-Debian-based distro:

We add the following line before More information::

> On <insert distro>, this program is installed as `<insert alias>`.

if the name is taken by another program on another non-Debian-based distro (i.e. needs disambiguation):

We add the following line before More information::

> On <insert distro>, the binary name `<insert name>` is taken by another program. See `tldr <insert Debian name for that program>`.

Consider the command lid from the id-utils package, and lid from the libuser package.

The solution here is to document id-utils's lid under lid.md, and document libuser's lid under libuser-lid.md. This is in alignment with Debian's naming.

Then, we added a disambiguation note to lid.md pointing to libuser-lid.md. Conversely, we added an alias note to libuser-lid.md pointing to lid.md.

Note that this solution ONLY covers the very specific case of "commands that have conflicting names across various linux distros", NOT the more general case of "commands have conflicting names". That should probably be discussed and decided on a case-by-case basis.

If this explanation is incorrect, I hereby give permission for maintainers to edit this comment to keep the history of this issue tidy, so long as you leave a changelog behind.

We can take a similar approach for binary conflicts within the same distro.

However, @EmilyGraceSeville7cf suggested consecutive dashes for distinguishing commands, which I think is a good approach because we already use a single dash for subcommands. What do you think?

Also, we need to properly document this on CONTRIBUTING.md.