Comment 1 for bug 286528

http://bugs.debian.org/499152 looks pretty serious to me. I don't think it's good to have a package in main which is guaranteed to be broken by default.

Also, does anyone in the server team or interested community maintainers actually have a tape, to test and fix bugs? It doesn't look like bacula wouldn't work without mt-st, it's only a recommends:

So if the server team is comfortable with fixing and maintaining mt-st, ok for me, but otherwise I think it should just be dropped to a Suggests.