[pkg-bacula-devel] Bug#1112322: bacula: make mt-st dependency "suggested" instead of "recommended"

[Jonas Jelten]

Package: bacula
Severity: wishlist

Dear Maintainer,

mt-st is only used for automatic tape changing via script, and the general audience using tape drives is presumably small.
To reflect this component to be optional and not installed by default, mt-st is moved to be suggested instead of recommended.
In Ubuntu we'd like to move bacula from universe to main, and we'd like to not support mt-st (and need a tape drive to test) for that.
I assume Debian could agree in the tape driver not being needed for most users, hence changing the dependency status of mt-st could be done at Debian as well.

The request in https://salsa.debian.org/bacula-team/bacula/-/merge_requests/8 couldn't be merged since mt-gnu has a bug to wait 2 minutes with empty tape drives:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=505904#18

Once this bug is adressed, bacula can default to mt-gnu, and mt-st can become suggested.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: trixie/sid
  APT prefers plucky-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'plucky-updates'), (500, 'plucky-security'), (500, 'plucky')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)