Re: Withdraw mt-st package?

[Costa Rasmussen <cdr@venus.star.net>]

Bill,

Please leave the mt_st package available.  If need be we can try to
find another maintainer.  I would not be able to use my SCSI disk
without the SCSI tape version of mt.

Thanks,
  Costa Rasmussen

   Date: Sat, 26 Aug 1995 10:46:14 -0700 (PDT)
   From: Bill Mitchell <mitchell@mdd.comm.mot.com>

   The mt-st package came about when someone complained in
   debian-devel that the mt program provided in the cpio package
   was either broken or somehow inadequate.  This alternative mt
   program has been available on linux ftp sites for some time,
   so I packaged it up and uploaded it for evaluation.

   That was several months ago, and I've received neither positive
   nor negative feedback about it.  Unless someone has a reason why
   it should be retained, I'd like to withdraw the mt-st package.

   If mt-st is retained, the conflict which it has with the mt
   program in the cpio package should be dealt with.  Currently,
   neither package is aware of the other, and the alternative
   mt programs and manpages which they contain will overwrite
   one another on installation.  Given the package-granularity
   focus of dpkg, the only way I know of to handle this cleanly
   is for the cpio package maintainer to unbundle cpio and mt
   from that package into two separate binary packages, so that
   the mt package thus created and the mt-st package can declare
   conflicts with one another.  (note that, even if mt-st is
   withdrawn, any other alternative mt package which appears will
   have this same problem).

   mitchell@mdd.comm.mot.com (Bill Mitchell)