mt-st project new homepage

Posted on February 7, 2016 with tags , . See the previous or next posts.

A short public notice: mt-st project new homepage at https://github.com/iustin/mt-st. Feel free to forward your distribution-specific patches for upstream integration!

Context: a while back I bought a tape unit to help me with backups. Yay, tape! All good, except that I later found out that the Debian package was orphaned, so I took over the maintenance.

All good once more, but there were a number of patches in the Debian package that were not Debian-specific, but rather valid for upstream. And there was no actual upstream project homepage, as this was quite an old project, with no (visible) recent activity; the canonical place for the project source code was an ftp site (ibiblio.org). I spoke with Kai Mäkisara, the original author, and he agreed to let me take over the maintenance of the project (and that’s what I intend to do: maintenance mostly, merging of patches, etc. but not significant work). So now there’s a github project for it.

There was no VCS history for the project, so I did my best to partially recreate the history: I took the debian releases from snapshots.debian.org and used the .orig.tar.gz as bulk import; the versions 0.7, 0.8, 0.9b and 1.1 have separate commits in the tree.

I also took the Debian and Fedora patches and applied them, and with a few other cleanups, I’ve just published the 1.2 release. I’ll update the Debian packaging soon as well.

So, if you somehow read this and are the maintainer of mt-st in another distribution, feel free to send patches my way for integration; I know this might be late, as some distributions have dropped it (e.g. Arch Linux).