Bug#1035415: tldr -u refers to non-existent branch and fails

[chylex]

Package: tldr

Version: 0.6.4-1+b2

Severity: important

Running tldr -u (--update) to download its offline cache fails with an error:

fatal: couldn't find remote ref master
tldr: Received ExitFailure 1 when running
Raw command: git pull origin master
Run from: /root/.local/share/tldr/tldr

This makes new installations unusable because tldr needs to download its offline cache before it can be used. Existing installations can still be used, but will not receive any updates to the offline cache.

The tldr repository has removed the master branch and broke old clients: https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr/issues/9628

The latest tldr version 0.6.4 in bullseye (stable) refers to the master branch which is now deleted.

[K.B.Dharun Krishna]

Hello chrylex,

We are aware of this issue, the client uses here is a third party one called tldr-hs (https://github.com/psibi/tldr-hs) which hasn't been updated to our recent client specification and still uses master branch for querying tldr cache (master branch was deprecated with notice in 2021 and all renaming community client authors in our wiki were notified by myself and other maintainers in the aforementioned issue before removal, unfortunately we don't endorce/list it in our wiki so It missed our oversight). Since, this Debian package is used by Ubuntu too, we are receiving a lot of reports from users there too in our chatroom.

The original maintainer/developer of the third party client doesn't know why their client is packaged under tldr package (https://github.com/psibi/tldr-hs/issues/37). We are having recent discussions regarding this here (https://matrix.to/#/!zXiOpjSkFTvtMpsenJ:gitter.im/$xmDWitQAj6dL3Ep4OMcqFNbZO3ZRgueYe7jeurTXOV8?via=gitter.im&via=matrix.org&via=one.ems.host) in our chatroom and I plan on contacting the package maintainer soon to rename the current package to tldr-hs and update tldr package with our official python client https://github.com/tldr-pages/tldr-python-client which is one of our official clients packaged in other distribution repositories too like Fedora and Arch.

In the meanwhile while we discuss the change, I would suggest using our Python client whose latest version can be installed using `pip`.

--

Regards, 
K.B.Dharun Krishna