you might have noticed the rumble in the Grml community about the new "install & rescue" mission of Grml and the dropped grml-small and 700MB ISOs.
Hi, this is Tom Oehser. I created something sort of similar to Grml in a far away time and place, called "tomsrtbt", so I have some bit of experience with rescue-focused distributions.
I'm totally supportive of the refocusing, but my challenge is that rescue is, if nothing else, very unpredictable. One can't say what will go wrong or what tools are needed. I consider it axiomatic for *rescue* systems that they should cram as many functions as possible onto the rescue media, with the obvious exception of gui fluff etc. That even includes some development tools to rebuild or link, some network analysis, lots of disk and tape and filesystem stuff, various scripting things to run scripts from mounted broken filesystems, the forensic stuff is a natural fit as anything forensic might help with rescue diagnostics, support for all the various backup formats, etc.
If you care about Grml and would like to see grml-small, grml-xl,...
Definitely what I want is grml-xl as far as having all packages that just might be necessary in a rescue situation. I'm willing to start to get involved with the idea that I might be able to help. I don't want to look for something else. Grml was an instant hit with me as before Grml I would boot Knoppix or an Ubuntu live cd and then use Aptitude to install lzop buffer atop dstat nc and cetera - Grml just magically had all the things I was using already. I also recognize that just sticking with .05 is a proposition that will become less attractive as time passes. And I'd certainly rather contribute back to the project than fork it...
-Tom