Entries by Michael Prokop

Moritz 'moemoe' Augsburger just joined the grml-team. He's a long-standing grml user and contributed several bugreports, patches and improvement suggestions.

grml version 2008.11 (all grml flavours) - codename Schluchtenscheisser - has been released and is currently being uploaded to the mirrors. The official release announcements providing all the relevant news are available:

• grml
• grml64
• grml-medium
• grml64-medium
• grml-small
• grml64-small

Issues regarding the releases can be found in the grml-wiki.

As usual you can get the ISO(s) via bittorrent, http and/or ftp from the mirrors listed at grml.org/download. Have fun and enjoy the new release! Your feedback is highly appreciated.

Release candidate 2 of grml 2008.11 is available via debian.netcologne.de/www.grml.org/devel/. Main changes from rc1 to rc2:

• Updated Debian packages by 2008-11-20
• Implemented isofrom and tohd bootoptions.
• Disabled NOPERSISTENT='Yes' in live-initramfs configuration
• Removed CONFIG_SECURITY_SMACK from kernel, fixes issue568
• Major update of grml-debootstrap (version 0.23)
• Some minor updates and fixes in grml related scripts and configurations.
• Updated documentation.

The stable release is expected to be released on this weekend (end of november), so please grab rc2 and give it a try.

I'm proud to be able to present release candidate 1 of the upcoming stable release 2008.11 - available in all the different grml flavours. New features? Tons of new features! Including an update of grml-small - and we even provide a 64bit version of grml-small now! Release Notes for grml 2008.11[-rc1] - codename "Schluchtenscheisser"are available online. The following flavours are available from the devel directory of grml's mirrors:

  grml_2008.11-rc1.iso           667M
  grml-medium_2008.11-rc1.iso    178M
  grml-small_2008.11-rc1.iso      75M
  grml64_2008.11-rc1.iso         687M
  grml64-medium_2008.11-rc1.iso  187M
  grml64-small_2008.11-rc1.iso    77M

Known issues of 2008.11-rc1 can be found in the grml-wiki. Please report any bug you notice so we can provide stable releases to you soon! Have fun with grml.

The new develreleases I just released contain several small updates, fixes and a kernel based on 2.6.26.7. I expect this to be last the devel release before releasing rc1 of version 2008.11. Working on release-notes, docs and testing.

Over the last few weeks the grml team evaluated the distributed version controll systemGit. Git is an open source, distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Read the wikipedia article on Git to get an (not so short) overview.

Grml used to work with the distributed version controll system Mercurial and officially announced its use on October 18th, 2006. The way Mercurial worked was great for us and at that time it definitely was the best solution for our needs. We provided detailed documentation for our setup (see grml.org/mercurial/) and developed our own utils for working with Mercurial and Debian packaging (grml-mercurial-utils). Special thanks to the Mercurial developers - we highly appreciate all your help!

But we had to re-evaluate the situation as time passed:

• in Debian Mercurial is not used for many packages (http://hg.debian.org), while Git is used a lot (git.debian.org) and there's visible progress on the Git front (for example git-buildpackage, topgit and vcs-pkg.org)
• situation of Git improved (like better documentation, tools for Debian packaging,...)
• Git provides better branching, rebasing which is great especially when you want to put essential software under your own control without having to fork it from upstream
• Git provides a low-level interface and all the important features as part of the Git suite. Mercurial provides some important features just as extension (which might not work on upgrades or don't play together with other extensions).
• more and more software we have to deal with is available in Git repositories

So whereas Mercurial used to work just fine for us in most cases Git provides the better approach for us nowadays.

Current state

Thanks to our hg-to-git tools the migration itself took less than 1 hour and all repositories have been migrated from hg.grml.org to git.grml.org.

By today (1st of october 2008) the grml mercurial repositories are deprecated and the official place for grml's sources is git.grml.org. The mercurial hosting will be deactivated within the next few weeks.

All the documentation and scripts of grml are being updated to reflect the changes and updated URLs but it has not been finished yet. So if you find something still mentioning hg.grml.org instead of git.grml.org please let us know, thanks!

As usual we provide documentation about our setup and tools:grml.org/git/

We highly appreciate any help, corrections and further feedback.

Special thanks to Michael Gebetsroither for his work and help on migrating.