[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#1001073: network-manager-openvpn: [bullseye] importing ovpn file using GUI results in non-functional VPN (fails due to auth timeout)

[Nicholas D Steeves]

Package: network-manager-openvpn
Version: 1.8.12-2
Severity: important
X-Debbugs-Cc: Michael Biebl <biebl at debian.org>, Mike Gabriel <sunweaver at debian.org>
Control: tags bullseye upstream fixed-upstream

Dear Michael and Mike,

I'm CCing you because I suspect the Utopia team might not read bugs
sent to pkg-utopia-maintainers at alioth-lists.debian.net...I'm sorry if
that's an unfair assessment, it just feels that way looking at the
bugs for network-manager-openvpn.  Mike, apologies if you're not part
of the team--I seem to remember that you were involved in a
Utopia-related tray applet, but maybe not?

I discovered this bug when I upgraded to testing before bullseye's
release, and I'm sorry that I did not report it until now.

With KDE/Plasma, after importing an OpenVPN configuration from an ovpn
config file, using the KDE/Plasma NM gui, the OpenVPN connection fails
after timing out during authentication.  Beyond that, there was
nothing useful in the log.  A manual CLI OpenVPN connection worked
100% fine.  I initially thought that the bug was in the config import
function, so after importing, I manually configured the connection to
the settings that are specified in the ovpn file, and the ones that I
knew would work.  Same problem...

The nature of this bug appears to be that network-manager-openvpn does
not pass the configuration defined in the GUI to OpenVPN daemon, thus
the OpenVPN connection fails.

I then created a local bpo of network-manager-openvpn_1.8.16-1, and
installed it, to see if this would solve the problem.  It solved the
problem.

The fix for bullseye should cherry-picked from upstream VCS to make
this package usable on Debian stable, because "The Debian Desktop
doesn't work with commercial VPNs" harms Debian's reputation IMHO.

Regards,
Nicholas