Comment # 1 on bug 1215160 from Andreas Stieger

Wipe was last touched upstream 2009-11-01, so not surprised here. Consider it
abandoned. What do you expect the distribution to do? The tool itself is not as
secure or useful as you may think for modern storage devices, setups, and file
systems. For the operations that are snake oil, better solutions exist-
including "cp /dev/{urandom,zero} ...", along with pv/pipemeter for a progress
bar.