Basing a package manager and related specification on bash is a mistake. Familiarity and hackability are great in the short-term, but as the novelty wears off it becomes clear that maintainability, efficiency, and other attributes hard to wrest from bash’s rigid design all suffer. As long as compatibility remains important for pkgcraft that decision can’t be altered; however, that doesn’t mean nothing can be done to improve the situation.

Before beginning these grand timesink chronicles, allow me to review my historical use of Gentoo that helps explain this project’s existence. Note that this narrative pertains only to my experience and contains blunt criticism of design choices made by the project.