Why only open VPN? Network-manager-gnome has support for all of the below, pptp Is also used a lot. I think we have it in live seed
network-manager-fortisslvpn-gnome/disco 1.2.8-2 amd64
network-manager-fortisslvpn/disco 1.2.8-2 amd64
network-manager-iodine-gnome/disco 1.2.0-3 amd64
network-manager-iodine/disco 1.2.0-3 amd64
network-manager-l2tp-gnome/disco 1.2.10-1 amd64
network-manager-l2tp/disco 1.2.10-1 amd64
network-manager-openconnect-gnome/disco 1.2.4-2ubuntu1 amd64
network-manager-openconnect/disco 1.2.4-2ubuntu1 amd64
network-manager-openvpn-gnome/disco 1.8.10-1 amd64
network-manager-openvpn/disco 1.8.10-1 amd64
network-manager-pptp-gnome/disco 1.2.8-2 amd64
network-manager-pptp/disco,now 1.2.8-2 amd64 [instalado, automático]
network-manager-ssh-gnome/disco 1.2.8-1 amd64
network-manager-ssh/disco 1.2.8-1 amd64
network-manager-strongswan/disco 1.4.4-2 amd64
network-manager-vpnc-gnome/disco 1.2.6-2 amd64
network-manager-vpnc/disco 1.2.6-2 amd64

It all depends on what we can test.

@hmollercl, it's up to you if you want to generalize this task.

I still think the best option would be to use network-manager-gnome for configuring but I don't know if we can disable nm-applet from autostart. Nm-tray can already connect to an existing VPN
Is not the programming/development that bothers me, it is the maintenance

OpenVPN is the go to standard for VPN. It's known to be secure and reliable. It's a requirement. L2TP is actually an unencrypted protocol, so IPsec is required to make it secure. There is some question as to whether or not IPsec has been compromised. Either way, the need for two protocols is slow. PPTP is common (Windows 95!) but known to be insecure (WINDOWS 95!). Now should we not use insecure protocols? We do have telnet and ftp still, so that's an argument for keeping these things. My concern is that given limited resources, we should focus on high priority items first and worry about low priority stuff later.

The other protocols I don't even know. And why the gnome specific ones?

The w/o gnome is the protocol, the with gnome is the GUI that I think is like another tab in the network-manager-gnome

My guess is that the GNOME ones are the UI components and the regular packages are the APIs and such. Can someone confirm that?

Jinx ;)

The GNOME ones are the GUI components for Network Manager. The base ones are the API-level plugins (though they work with nmcli).