[Grml-devel] grml-rescueboot

[Michael Prokop]

Hi Ryan,

sorry for the delay in getting to your mail

* Ryan Finnie [Wed Jun 03, 2020 at 08:49:36PM -0700]:

> 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.

I very much appreciate your efforts, thanks for reaching out to us!

I'm absolutely not opposed to it, I'm just wondering how the
bugreports against grub-loopback-iso are supposed to be handled
then. Should a team be formed and bug reports are forwarded to the
according teams (Finnix, Grml, Ubuntu,...)? Bugreports against Grml
ISOs e.g. could be reported against grml-rescueboot then, but what
about other distributions though? Which distributions should be
"supported" then?

Do you have an overview which distributions support loopback boot
nowadays and could/would be supported within grub-loopback-iso?

> [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.

I think this dates back to the work around
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=750072
:)

regards
-mika-
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