vpnc port is not up to date comparing to Linux

[ngrigoriev@…]

I had troubles getting my VPN connection to work on MBP running Lion. As you surely know by now, original CiscoVPN client does not work at all on 64-but MBP with Lion so VPNC is the only choice. My VPN gateway was Cisco 1811, its IOS VPN (plus not very collaborative IT department ;) ).

Authentication simply did not work, I have tried everything I could. I have tried VPNC on Linux (Ubuntu 11.04) and surprisingly it worked with exactly the same config file. Puzzled, I have recompiled manually VPNC on Linux and Mac and found that Ubuntu seems to be using the original vpnc 0.5.3 AND a huge 217K+ patch to it. So I took this source code from Ubuntu, compiled it on Mac and almost instantly got my VPN working (had to force local port to 0 in the config file - I believe the default port 500 was already used by native client).

I do believe macports should have the vpnc source code updated with the same patch...these 217Kb are not only comments.

This is where I have downloaded the source code from: ​http://packages.ubuntu.com/natty/net/vpnc

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

If these patches are so essential, why don't the developers of vpnc release a new version including them? Have you spoken with them about this?

[ngrigoriev@…]

I was also puzzled by this patch...There are 6632 lines in there and most of it is actually the code. I was so excited by finally getting my VPN connection to work that I did not check the author's page carefully enough (​http://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~massar/vpnc/). Latest release was vpnc-0.5.3.tar.gz Wed Nov 19 21:29:22 CET 2008 but the _actual_ latest revision in SVN trunk is 473 (Sat, 12 Nov 2011)! So, after 0.5.3 nobody bothered making a stable release, I believe.

Which creates a dilemma. From one point of view, the gap between latest release and current snapshot is 3 years and more than a hundred of code revisions. And I assure you that they do make difference :) However, I imagine that macports deal with stable releases only, so just taking a current snapshot to replace the original release may be against macports principles. I am not that familiar with macports to suggest an action :( Probably creating a separate port based on the current snapshot from vpnc's SVN (something like "vpnc-unstable") would be appropriate?

Thanks

[nonstop.server@…]

Cc Me!