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by IshKebab 723 days ago
> Second is situations where you'd rather not add an additional dependency, but bash is pretty much a given. For example, CI environments, scripts in dev environments, container entrypoints. Or things that area already written in bash.

Is this tool not an additional dependency?

> But bash is just really ubiquitous

Biggest crime of the Unix world probably.

2 comments

> Is this tool not an additional dependency?

"Dependency" generally means "external dependency".

It's only a dependency if your solution's build process fetches it from its upstream repo. (Or worse: it's just mentioned in some manual build instructions as one of the things your solution needs.)

This is small enough to copy into the source tree of your solution, in which case it's no longer a dependency.

> Is this tool not an additional dependency?

It is, but if you already have bash, adding another shell script isn't much of a jump. e.g. I'd feel OK about committing jb to another repo for use from a .envrc file to set up an environment, whereas committing a binary would not feel good.

> Biggest crime of the Unix world probably.

Sorry if I'm perpetuating this! :) My take is that problem is not with bash, the problem is that it's hard for more advanced tools to replace it.