Well, I'm not happy about the way mesg and write have been removed.
Is not the case that "mesg n" also disables talk? If yes, maybe
a better idea would have been to remove write but not mesg.
Also: What would happen if a user takes the write program
from an old Debian release and put it in their $HOME. Would it
work as normal, or would it need some special capability?
If it would work as normal, then users would still need "mesg n"
to disable incoming messages.
So: Can we rethink the details of this removal?
Well, I see there is a setting in /etc/login.defs which would
make "mesg n" unnecessary by default (the file also explains
how it works, it's not a capability but a group ownership).
So in theory, we could have been dropped the "mesg n" from .profile
in bookworm (if we wanted) regardless of mesg being removed from
util-linux. Is this right?
In either case, I still don't see the point in removing
this from util-linux. Sure that nobody uses it these days,
but is there a real need to remove it? I think it would be
better to follow upstream here.
Thanks.
