Would be interesting to test this out on SourceMage[0], seeing as how its package manager is written entirely in bash.
Since I have my hands full with the distros I'm using, I may not be able to try it for awhile, but I saved this page for further reading. I still think distros are somewhat "broken", so alternative approaches are interesting to me. (Just one problem off the top of my head: packages are old, distros can't keep up with PyPI, npm, CRAN, etc.)
If you know the SourceMage code, please try it with OSH :) Or if you know its developers, they might want to hear about a cleaner shell that's compatible with bash (although it's nascent)
I spent some time last fall implementing some constructs that the Nix package manager uses, even though I don't use Nix. Nix uses bash heavily as well.
That said, I think you've highlighted _the_ problem that _all_ distros face that would get me to change distros if someone solved it. That is to say, “(Just one problem off the top of my head: packages are old, distros can't keep up with PyPI, npm, CRAN, etc.)” That is a doozy of a problem.
One last thing–you mention four things:
The trap builtin is unimplemented;
alias is also unimplemented.
set -h / hashall is a stub that does nothing.
OSH builds are in a sense "shallow".
Implementing `trap', `alias', `set -h' seem like no-brainers prior to 0.4
But yes I do think distros are doing the best they can with the raw material they have to work with (upstream sources, autoconf, etc.) I have some ideas for a distro but I think I have my hands full with shell, and it is a big problem because you can't do it by yourself. You need an army to help you maintain packages to some standard!
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For the shallow problem, I'll probably implement something like set -o hijack-shebang. It's relatively easy for OSH to open scripts it runs and check for a shebang that looks like a shell, and then prepend "osh" to the argv array.
It should really only be used for debugging OSH, because it wouldn't be good practice to "lie" about your shebangs. That logic is fundamental and baked into the kernel!
"trap" has come up a lot, although I'm not sure if it will be in the 0.4 release. I'm making releases pretty often -- every 6 weeks or so. "alias" is interesting because it sits between the lexer and the parser, and no other shell feature is like that.
I didn't mention that because it's not a good idea yet to make OSH the default shell on any system :)
Sounds great! You put so much effort into your blog posts, it's impressive…