[Grml-devel] grml-rescueboot

[Ryan Finnie]

Hi all, I'm the maintainer of Finnix, which recently released a new
version after 5 years[0].  A user asked if I was planning on updating
grub-finnix, a functional equivalent of grml-rescueboot.

I'm going to cut out most of a conversation I had with Paul Wise since
it was a bunch of embarrassing half-remembered history[1], but in a
nutshell, grml-rescueboot is actually perfectly capable of setting up
ISOs in grub via the loopback.cfg standard, which means that many
distros (Debian, Ubuntu, Grml, Finnix, etc) can utilize it, but it's not
immediately apparent, and it calls the generated menu entries Grml, but
are otherwise functional.

What I'd like to propose is to genericize grml-rescueboot as
grub-loopback-iso.  This package could be aware of distros (e.g.
continue to say "Grml Rescue System" for grml-*.iso).  I also have a few
additional wanted updates, namely fixing the grub dependencies so it can
be used on arm64 UEFI (which it also would otherwise work fine on).  The
grml-rescueboot package could remain and depend on grub-loopback-iso, as
it has the update-grml-rescueboot script which *is* Grml-specific.

If this is something we agree can be pursued, I'm willing to do the work
(conceptually, https://github.com/finnix/grub-loopback-iso-pkg is about
80% of the work done already, but would need more work to be a proper
transitional from grml-rescueboot).  I just wanted to make sure this is
something Grml is not opposed to.

Thanks,
Ryan Finnie


[0] https://blog.finnix.org/2020/05/14/finnix-120-released/
[1] In 2014 I had apparently forked grml-rescueboot as
grub-loopback-iso, but never got it into Debian.  And at some point it
was added as a grml-rescueboot git branch?
(http://git.grml.org/?p=grml-rescueboot.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/grub-loopback-iso)
 So it was known about and maybe was discussed at some point, but I
honestly don't remember.  I had updated my grub-loopback-iso and was
looking for sponsors when Paul reminded me of grml-rescueboot again.

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