Currently, test/compatibility/compatibility_test_for_releases.sh is a Bash-specific shell script. This script has grown over the years and is now about 1200 lines. This combination of size and language is proving to be a real productivity drain – for WT-14836, it took me about ten times longer to deal with Bash footguns than with the business logic.

This is compounded by the difficulty of reading shell scripts, since this isn't a script that people work with often enough to become an expert in.

We should rewrite this in Python to reduce the maintenance cost to something reasonable.