[vpnc-devel] VPNC-Nortel for Mac OS X

[Freek Dijkstra]

Hi all,

What's the current status of the VPNC-nortel branch?

About two years Swapnil Pandit and Antonio Borneot created a few patches
for r414 so vpnc-nortel would work on a Mac. I tried to port these
patches to r449 but failed. I did however, put a how-to together, and
some people even seem to have found that useful.

With snow leopard (Mac OS 10.6), some more patches were required (see
http://lists.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/pipermail/vpnc-devel/2011-May/003549.html),
but those were never included (neither in
http://svn.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/vpnc/branches/vpnc-nortel/, nor in David's
git://git.infradead.org/users/dwmw2/vpnc-scripts.git).
Now with Lion (Mac OS 10.7) another small patch is required
(https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/issues/6437).

So it seems that to get vpnc-nortel to work on the Mac, people have to
reside to 2 patches and 1 external script for an old version of a branch
of vpnc. This seems non-trivial.

I no longer use vpnc-nortel myself (hence I did not try again to update
the patch to r449 or the current r457), but also regret to see the
current state of vpnc.

It seems preferable to see more upstream mergers (e.g. the above
mentioned patched in David Woodhouse scripts; David Woodhouse scripts
into the official vpnc-nortel branch; the vpnc-nortel branch into vpnc,
etc.), but alas, that is not the case.

For now, let me focus on one particular point. Would there be interest
to merge any Mac OS X patches into the vpnc-nortel branch?

Unfortunately, I have proven too dumb to get the Mac patches ready for
r449 or r457. Is there interest from someone to help with this? If so,
what is needed? Would it help if I try to provide access to a Mac OS X
machine for a couple of weeks to one of the developers?

Regards,
Freek