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Why Zesk Build

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The most compelling reason for using this toolkit is simple, readable consistency across projects and platforms using a tool which is universally available on nearly every platform on the planet and uses consistent, tested and documented tools which are open source.

If you live in your shell, and use Bash – we recommend you check out the functionality which is offered and see if it will work for your projects. Zesk Build eats its own dog food so this tool is used in production environments and configures remote pipelines identically, delivers credentials to developers and keeps our credentials synchronized using an add-on library called Infrastructure which manages infrastructure configuration in the cloud using Terraform or OpenTofu and deploying of Development Operations values used for any number of configuration environments.

Why build it?

Here's a bullet list of reasons:

  • Littering of shell scripts in every project, many with similar functionality between projects
  • Rewriting the same shell function in many places
  • Patterns in Bash are consistent
  • System tools and flags used across platforms are inconsistent
  • Useful to have a toolkit which operates outside the default application languages (isolation, independence)
  • Useful to have a toolkit with few dependencies which can fully configure and set up other platforms in a platform-independent language
  • No assertion libraries available which work well with Bash
  • No validation libraries available which work well with Bash
  • "Oh yeah, I forgot that timeouts for read don't work the same when we switched from Ubuntu to Alpine distros for our application."
  • identicalCheck was written and then became sort of part of the way this toolkit is built.
  • Everyone invents their own decoration libraries so why not us? Wink.

Why bash?

  • Raw sh is too primitive and bash is universally available across platforms and systems
  • Is familiar to most developers who communicate with *nix cloud systems
  • Open source, supported by GNU, installed on Debian, Ubuntu, macOS and most Unix variants

Why Zesk?

Market Acumen, Inc. which owns the copyrights to this software registered the domain name zesk.com which is short and memorable and has been working on building software technologies around that name. Another toolkit (Zesk for PHP)(https://github.com/zesk/zesk) shares the name.

The name is sort of like desk or zest which is a nice association for software which helps you build software.

Why Bash 3 support and not Bash 4?

Honestly our development is primarily on macOS which has stubbornly fixed on Bash 3 and since set the default shell to zsh.

It has not been a challenge to remain compatible with Bash 3 so until that becomes a burden the intent is to maintain support of Bash 3 and greater until they pry it from my cold, dead fingers. Or I change my mind.

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