> sorcery is a nice package manager; the only one i've ever actually > liked, but yeah, it's a monster. a short time after i stopped using it > i was interested to see someone report he'd actually reduced the size > of his shell script by converting it from bash to ordinary sh; using > the proper tools instead of bashisms had shortened it. i wondered what > would happen to sorcery if so converted, but it was just idle > speculation.
i have never seen a very large shell script that i found readable. of course the waters have been polluted by gnu configure scripts, but i still think the idea is invalid. just as one makes every attempt to keep a c function from exceeding a page or so, it follows that one should keep the individual units in shell scripts small. the individual unit of scripting is imho ... a script, not a function. this is because it is too hard to do much isolation within a script. even with functions. patch/* is a good example of a structured set of scripts. - erik
