phpLDAPadmin -- is it time to drop this from ports?

[Per olof Ljungmark]

On 04/05/18 15:30, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> On 05/04/2018 13:35, Per olof Ljungmark wrote:
>>
>> Quoting Matthew Seaman <matthew at freebsd.org>:
>>
>>> Dear all,
>>>
>>> I've maintained the net/phpldapadmin port for _many_ years.
>>> Unfortunately this project seems to have ceased development upstream.
>>> There hasn't been a new release for more than 5 years, nor any sign
>>> of life from the original developer over much the same timespan.  PLA
>>> still just about works, but it is lacking in support for more recent
>>> versions of PHP and generally sufferring from lack of love.
>>>
>>> I'm beginning to think that it is about time to take this port around
>>> the back of the barn and administer the coup-de-grace.  There are
>>> other graphical front-ends to LDAP directories available, such as
>>> 'LDAP Account Manager' https://www.ldap-account-manager.org/lamcms/
>>> (in ports as sysutils/ldap-account-manager), so people won't be left
>>> entirely out to dry.
>>>
>>> What do people think?  Is it time to deprecate and expire PLA, or is
>>> there a diehard core of users for whom PLA will need to be ripped
>>> from their cold, dead hands?
>>
>> One diehard here... hands still warm...
>>
>> Have tried ldap-account-manager but does not suit my need at all.
>> Unless anyone has a better suggestion for a lightweight web-based
>> utility I vote for it to stay.
> 
> I have a vague recollection of a web-based LDAP front end written in
> python, but I entirely failed to make any sort of proper note about what
> it was called...
> 
>> I did an install just a month ago on php71 so not sure about "lacking
>> in support for more recent
>> versions of PHP", do you have any specifics?
> 
> Yes, sure.  PLA sufferred from the upstream deprecation of mcrypt within
> PHP.  We've added local patches to work around the problem -- these have
> been obtained "from the net", basically a corps of PLA users supporting
> it in an ad-hoc fashion between themselves.  As the dropping of mcrypt
> affected core functionality like *logging in*, you might think upstream
> would patch the core distribution and make a new release fairly rapidly,
> but there's absolutely no sign of that.
> 
> Personally I'm fairly happy to leave PLA to hum along to itself for the
> time being, but if future changes to PHP render it unusable, or if there
> are nasty security bugs discovered and no fixes available, I'm going to
> have to reconsider.

Thank you for considering.

I'll try to find out where this ad-hoc work was going on and who did it
- don't think mcrypt is missed by many.

I'm a little surprised I'm the only one answering here as well...

//per