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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

Why not just install a newer version of bash? It’s trivial to do so with homebrew. I’m sure your team has other dependencies that must be installed in order to run your software.

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Because a shell script is supposed to be a lowest common denominator. Run this, and it'll ensure you have Maven, it'll ensure you have Java 11+, then it'll build the thing and run the thing.

And now I'm needing to sniff your OS, detect whether or not Homebrew is installed, install it if not, then install Bash >3, then run the actual meat of the script.

All because of Apple's lawyers being scared of GPLv3.

At this point, I may as well insist that you install pyenv and Poetry and deliver it as a Python package.

Bash is not a common denominator anywhere except Linux. Just write what you want as POSIX shell and it will work in a lot of places.

You already have to deal with platform-specific differences even (nay - especially!) across Linux with things like apt vs yum vs dnf vs pacman vs Nix. One more is really a non-issue.

Yeah, fair enough, I'm just bitter after my shiny new associative array failed and I had roll back to a worse option.

Bash really isn't a standard outside of most Linux distributions, you're going to find the same issue anywhere that isn't Linux.

OpenBSD uses pdksh, Busybox/NetBSD/Minix use ash, there are some linux distros that use zsh, OpenSolaris is ksh, etc.

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