[layoutIfNeeded]

If you can afford using a package manager then you can afford using something more sophisticated than bash.

The whole point of bash is that it’s ubiquitous: be it an air-gapped embedded system, a recovery image or a full desktop environment, you can count on it having either bash or something reasonably close, no strings attached.

Introducing a Rube Goldberg package manager would go against this.

[yourapostasy]

I can see in the use case of building up scaffolding between many different Unices to a common reference point sufficient to serve as an abstraction layer for a packaged software product to code against a generic Unix model, a Bash package manager might be useful. Some of those Bash-based abstraction layers can get relatively sprawling, and a packaging system would serve a useful role as a configuration dispatcher.

Instead of a bewildering array of case/if statements for each architecture/distro in every script, the package manager stores and deploys the platform-specific scripts, and make reading/maintaining them more streamlined. Then your case/if selection of the platform-specific environment is centralized into a single centralized location where the package manager call for installation is made.

I agree however that in an in-house setting, if I had the choice to use a package manager, then I'd be choosing a language other than Bash.

[stephenr]

What is “reasonably close”?

Bash isn’t necessarily gonna be installed on a bsd system and it’s not exactly recent on macOS - it’s possible it’ll be dropped there too.

I’m not saying don’t write shell, I’m saying don’t assume bash specifically is available.

There’s only one bash, but there’s plenty of shells that implement POSIX “sh”.