Tools / libraries for use when scripting against tape libraries?

[Christian Svensson]

Good day,

I would like to know what hidden gems people are using when operating
tape libraries.
So far I have the Bareos/Bacula commands of course, but when I need to
manually reset tapes I go back to using "mtx + mt".

The sg3_utils suite has sg_inq and sg_raw which can be useful - and
then we have https://github.com/arogge/maminfo which I use frequently
to verify what tape I just loaded with my mtx commands.

Something I have found annoying is that tools sometimes use /dev/sgX
and sometimes use /dev/stX, and having to use sg_map to resolve which
points to which.
Coupled with the fact that I have found no tools that do READ ELEMENT
STATUS to present to me what tape drive (/dev/sgX and /dev/stX) is
e.g. drive 1 and drive 2, makes for an overall pretty poor user
experience.
OPEN/CLOSE IMPORT/EXPORT ELEMENT is another one that is not
implemented by any tool, and when I asked about it on the mtx mailing
list, no interest was shown.

I am thinking of building a python library that can handle all these
things above, with a simple CLI to mostly replace using mtx and allow
for things like JSON outputs.
But before doing so, I would love to know what tools that are out
there that I have indeed missed.

Regards,