Modernizing scripts in Tribblix

It's something I've been putting off for far too long, but it's about time to modernize all the shell scripts that Tribblix is built on.

Part of the reason it's taken this long is the simple notion of, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

But some of the scripting was starting to look a bit ... old. Antiquated. Prehistoric, even.

And there's a reason for that. Much of the scripting involved in Tribblix is directly derived from the system administration scripts I've been using since the mid-1990s. That involved managing Solaris systems with SVR4 packages, and when I built a distribution derived from OpenSolaris, using SVR4 packages, I just lifted many of my old scripts verbatim. And even new functionality was copied or slightly modified.

Coming from Solaris 2.3 through 10, this meant that they were very strictly Bourne Shell. A lot of the capabilities you might expect in a modern shell simply didn't exist. And much of the work was to be done in the context of installation (i.e. Jumpstart) where the environment was a little sparse.

The most obvious code smell is extensive use of backticks rather than $(). Some of this I've refactored over time, but looking at the code now, not all that much.

One push for this was adding ShellCheck to Tribblix (it was a little bit of a game getting Haskell and Cabal to play nice, but I digress).

Running ShellCheck across all my scripts gave it a lot to complain about. Some of the complaints are justified, although many aren't (it's very enthusiastic about quoting everything in sight, even when that would be completely wrong).

But generally it's encouraged me to clean the scripts up. It's even managed to find a bug, although looking at code it thinks is just rubbish has found a few more by inspection.

The other push here is to speed things up. Tribblix is often fairly quick in comparison to other systems, but it's not quick enough for me. But more of that story later.