Status of packages buffer mindi mindi-busybox mondo

[Michael Schwendt]

An update here, since Bruno has also replied but is not subscribed to devel at .

I've had a look at some of the packages, found a few issues and added
comments in bugzilla. 

 * Busybox (and mindi-busybox) contain another bundled MD5 implementation
originally by Ulrich Drepper.

 * "buffer" has been retired in 2011 in a questionable way. There has not
been a FTBFS ticket in bugzilla for it in 2011. Perhaps the related
notifications on devel@ list have not been mailed to package owners.
I don't know the details.

 * It is not known yet why Bruno is not a member of the packager group
anymore.

 * That mindi-busybox contains a forked copy of Busybox, is something
I don't feel comfortable with.

It is not clear to me either how much interest in mondo there is among
Fedora users. Starting to work on these review requests just because they
are the oldest one that have been stalled for various reasons, doesn't
sound right.

Usually, it's easy to push a new package through the review process,
provided that there is a minimum of activity from the submitter and the
reviewer(s). An extra plus, if the participants are users of the software
with real interest in it and are packagers, who may perform the review and
approve the package.

There has been activity in the mondo review ticket (62 comments so far is
much more than the average), and mindi has been up to 40 comments between
2006 and 2011, too, but inbetween there have been several years of
complete silence. For example, from 2008-12-14 to 2011-11-18.
The non-responding reviewer has been tolerated from 2008 to 2013 even.
I would not have waited five years for something to happen magically and
would have raised an alarm-bell much earlier or would have swapped
reviewers with other package submitters. I mean, some of the tickets have
not been visible to reviewers even. The set of packages has been submitted
in 2006. It feels like several years have been lost.

Personally, I'm pretty much a mondorescue newbie, since I've seen it in use
some years ago related to Debian. I don't know how popular it is, and whether
Fedora Users use it actually. 

It would certainly be helpful, if there were a user community working on
the reviews and the packages for Fedora. It would not be helpful if I
jumped in to approve them just to get these old tickets fixed, but without
community interest in them.