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-loop...) 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.