It should be usable for "cloud config" files long before that! :) But yes changing existing code at the lower distro level has a lot more inertia. The cloud i

It should be usable for "cloud config" files long before that! :) But yes changing existing code at the lower distro level has a lot more inertia. The cloud is basically built on top of Linux distros, so that part is easier to change and is rapidly evolving. You could say that the = issue is deliberate, but I'd say the core problem is that shell didn't start out as a programming language, or at least it was a very impoverished one without variables. The original paper from the 70's on the Thompson shell shows that. Shell had "goto" but no variables! So name=value had to be grafted on later without breaking too many things. Words were already split by spaces, so I guess they just made name=value a "pseudo-word" that becomes an assignment, whereas name = value remained 3 words.