While waiting for a connection in the Vienna airport, I thought to touch on another topic. The faster_processing branch is now almost 2150 lines. Some of it are empty lines, lots of comments. Some lines count (probably nearly 100) could be decreased by simply condensing these structures
if [ condition ]
then
[dosomething]
fi
for i in a b c
do
[dosomething]
done
To these
if [ condition ]; then
[dosomething]
fi
for i in a b c; do
[dosomething]
done
This would be nice. However the script would still be too long to comfortably navigate.
So I'd suggest splitting a library out of it. In particular, the 2 biggest things we have are processing-related and config-related. Probably splitting out the config-related functions (around 560 lines including spaces and comments) into a separate library would make sense. The processing code is actually less than that at about 450 lines (including everything again) but still pretty big. So also makes sense to consider splitting it into its own library.
I know that this doesn't exactly fit with "one script, super easy install" philosophy but I suppose that this philosophy was devised way before anyone knew about the path this project actually took. And I'd suggest to consider adjusting it at this point.
Maybe not with the upcoming release but eventually.