Munin is thought by many to be the best alliance tool available, and it is now used by more than five different alliances, which is testament to all the hard work jester and others have put in over the years. However, Munin is now over 3 years old and is starting to show its age.
Merlin is a complete rewrite of Munin's core from the ground up. What does this mean for the end user? Absolutely nothing: at the moment, Munin and Merlin's functionality are around 95% the same, Merlin has a few minor feature tweaks. In fact, large amounts of Munin's function code remains unchanged.
Under the hood, the changes are quite significant and many long term "to-do" changes have been implemented; all of this will allow us to push the code forward in the coming rounds, and you can expect to see things like an integrated website in time. We're always looking for more people to join in with the development, hopefully the new code will be much more approachable: join us in #munin if you're interested.
In developing Merlin, the fact that so many people now use Munin has been a major thinking point, and the installation and configuration of Merlin has been designed to be incredibly simple. Alliances will still need tech-minded people to install the software, but setup should be a lot more straight forward. As always though, come along to #munin if you need any help!
The source can be found
here, though I recommend you read
this first. As with Munin, it's released under GPLv2.
A huge thanks to jester and qebab without whom this wouldn't have been possible, as well as Heartless, zawze and everyone else in #munin!