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

[Carmel NY]

On Fri, 6 Apr 2018 10:32:54 +0200, Per olof Ljungmark stated:

>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.

sysutils/ldap-account-manager has proved to be the best alternative I have
found yet to phpLDAPadmin. The documentation sucks and I believe that the
maintainer could do a better job of explaining how to get the program up and
running, similar to what Matthew does with "phpLDAPadmin", but that is just my
own opinion. The fact is, *.nix programs are not known, with the exception of
Postfix and a few others, of having great documentation.

>> 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.  
>
>The Python based tool is probably web2ldap, I will try it out but the
>port version lags upstream a bit.

I am contacting the maintainer now and asking him if he could possibly update
the port.

>A bit of googling shows that there is most likely enough users of
>phpldapadmin so that patches will be available to make it php72-safe.

Nothing has happened in years, but it is worth a shot. I like "phpLDAPadmin".
I don't know why it was abandoned.

>//per

-- 
Carmel